Originally published at: "Pro-God, Pro-Gun, Pro-Trump" candidate seems to be Pro-Photoshop, too | Boing Boing
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The next GOP star right there.
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“God/Gun/Trump” is quickly replacing “Father/Son/Holy Spirit” as the new Divine Trinity.
Sorry J.C., you’re not gonna keep the right-wingers with all that “love thy neighbor” garbage.
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Truly Putin would approve of these Alternative Facts. And f they get debunked — then their “staged by the opposition.”
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“It appears a darkening filter was used on the ad.”
Uh, ok. Presumably the people in the photo can be identified and settle, once and for all, whether he was the one in the photo with them. Although even if true, all it proves is that he served with some Black guys… who were willing to stand next to him in a photo. That’s not even “I have Black friends,” as sad as that is.
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I wonder if they have the rights to use that picture.
Even if they do, can the person that was originally in the picture sue for something?
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“I can’t be racist, I exist in the vicinity of Black humans”.
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JESUS BABIES GUNS is still the all-time winner. edit it’s JESUS GUNS BABIES lol
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OK, so this could just be a really shitty use of a vignetteing filter centered on the dude’s face. I don’t think the name tape issue has much merit (it definitely says “MANDEL”, it’s just blurry, and I can’t attest to anything to do with uniform standards).
Even assuming the photo is completely on the up-and-up, it sure is a bad look. “HEY, PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE THAT I HAVE BEEN IN THE PRESENCE OF BLACK PEOPLE, EVERYONE, HOW CAN I BE A RACIST, HUH?”
I guess we’ll find out whether this is a case of “But I have Black acquaintances” or “I’m so desperate to signal that I have Black acquaintances that I resorted to Photoshop” when the original image comes out.
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Pro photoshop doesn’t seem accurate. That’s clearly a rookie photoshop mistake, a pro would never oveerlook something so obvious
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From what I recall that is where them patches go. But notice the other guys in the image either aren’t wearing them, or they aren’t visible. And yet the patches on Mandel are clearly visible and jump out.
Plus as the article points out. There’s some kind of obvious artifacting going on around that head, and a certain flatness and lack of detail from the mid torso up that speaks to paste jobs.
Certainly doesn’t look like a vignette filter, it it was it’d be set narrowly in an ellipse around Mandel’s upper torso and head. But there’s no gradient on any perceived dim bits, and the only portion of the frame that looks darker is the bottom right corner. Rather than an even field around the whole frame.
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The main reason I am giving the vignette filter hypothesis any credence is that, although his hands are absurdly dark, they are (ballpark) lighter than the other hands in the photo in a similar way that his face is lighter than theirs (and something something handwaving about the darkness floor in the color gamut). The lower half of the picture does seem generally darker than the upper half. [Also acknowledged, there are MANY different variations on skin tone in the universe, so it could have nothing to do with filtering AT ALL.]
I’m not convinced that this isn’t photoshopped with the intent to deceive, to be clear. But I’ve also seen enough wacky bad-in-a-not-intended-to-be-manipulative-way photo editing that this could, just could, be a more honest kind of photographic dishonesty. The Venn diagram of people who would forget to tweak the hands’ skin tone in a manipulative edit has a lot of overlap with the one who would try to lighten a photo by just slapping a filter on the top half in a less-manipulative one.
All that notwithstanding there have been other comments about artifacts that I am definitely not in a position to analyze myself. One thing that makes this harder is that it’s a still capture of a video feed, and that introduces all kinds of other noise. Of course, that could be something that a photo manipulator is relying on.
If you notice that he is in Woodland camo form the chest to shoulders and desert camo from the torso down.
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I don’t think so. The Marine uniforms at the time have nearly identical patterns, just in different colors.
So for whatever the fuck is going on around the shoulders to be a different pattern, they’d need to be using a photo from the time, with a more traditional woodland pattern, but in an identical cut. The earlier BDU pattern isn’t cut the same around the collar and chest.
I think that stretches the imagination. There’s certainly some of that weird up in that region. Especially around the right shoulder, where the peak/seam is lower and wider than would follow from the line of his actual shoulder. With a weird divot where the color transitions. But shitty photoshop is much simpler solution.
My brother was in the Marine Corps around the same time as Mandel. And outside of the field tests of the prototype patterns. I don’t think he was ever issued anything but the Desert scheme anyway.
Which would not happen with a vignette. The top and sides would be equally dark, and the center would be lighter. You also wouldn’t have the weirdly dark area around his shoulders. Either from a single filter, or from the lighting. The hands could not be darkened more than the shirt immediately adjacent to them. Which is consistent with the brightness of the shirt further up his chest.
Something has been done, specifically to Mandel’s image, from midchest/bicep up.
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The nailbeds don’t appear to be darkened at all.
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