The whole Kate Middleton Photoshopping scandal is bizarrely inexplicable. Journalists have now identified nearly two dozen edits to the Mother's Day picture, and the inexplicable part is that they're both clumsy and pointless. Kate says she did the edits herself, which is kind of believable. Certainly no expert did this stuff.
And why? The edits are all tiny and accomplish nothing. The Guardian's imaging manager thinks that several images were composited together, which would explain the large number of anomalies but not the reason for doing it. Photoshop itself wouldn't have been so clumsy constructing a composite, which means Kate manually cut and pasted pieces from different frames into the primary shot.
But that doesn't make sense either. I don't really care much if Kate decided to spruce up an image a little bit, but on a purely technical level I'm burning with curiosity about what really happened.
You are complaining about artistic expression?
That photos aren't as journalistic as they used to be may be a generational moment.
Does anyone object to this?
https://twitter.com/NoContextBrits/status/1766905759512621160
Indeed, that is pretty rich coming from Kevin "Photoshop" Drum...
What explains this fascination Americans have with a bunch of inbred people who have no redeeming qualities?
A lot of US Americans have that, and I just don't get it. But then I don't do reality TV, either, and I think it is effectively the same thing.
Fuck hereditary despots, even the vestigial sort.
Beats me, I thought 1776 meant I don’t have to care particularly about these people.
No, it meant that we get fawn all over royalty without paying for them.
And how is it different from fawning over the Kardashians, or whatever dumb celebrity turns one's crank?
"And how is it different from fawning over the Kardashians, or whatever dumb celebrity turns one's crank?"
Correct--it's all stupid.
It's like Brits cheering on the NFL!
I will see your Britons cheering-on the NFL and raise you - the British Basketball League...
Good heavens, a woman has to have something to do when she can’t get out of the palace. Might as well go through pictures and make changes.
This. The poor woman is bored and restless while she convalesces from her procedure, and she just started fiddling with Photoshop to pass the time.
The simplest explanations are the best.
The internet makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber. —Kevin Drum
Photoshop makes good photographers better and bad photographers worse -iamr4man
????????????
And its got at least one writer at Kevin's old stomping grounds making veiled but still plausibly-deniable suggestions that Kate Middleton is a victim of abuse.
I don't really care that much about the goings on of the royal family. But you also have to consider the context -- the photo was posted after weeks of speculation about her health after her abdominal procedure. There were rumors starting up, they posted this photo, and speculation went wild.
Maybe she edited herself. But under the circumstances, I don't think she posted it without approval/encouragement of whoever manages royal PR. They are too disciplined to for Kate to be doing this on her own.
Does it mean anything? I have no idea. And I'm not too curious -- if there is some big secret, it will eventually come out, and if not, who cares what this was about. But I don't buy "Kate Middleton, amateur Photoshopper" for a minute.
Have you seen the adds where a bunch of pictures are all combined so everyone has their eyes open and are looking at the camera? All done automatically by your phone. How about, not what do they call it, magic eraser???
Maybe she doesn't have the latest phone, so.....
I can’t believe this story somehow exists for weeks in our media. As if it materially, legally or financially matters at all to anybody on earth whether Kate was dead or alive: her husband still remains king heir apparent in either event, she’s already produced another heir for her husband and the royal family literally has no role whatsoever in shaping government policy other than opening and closing sessions of parliament (which is clearly a ceremonial role that if the royals decided to play hardball on it, parliament would just chuck the monarchy).
Kate needs to just tell everybody that (1) she doctored the photos herself (which she did admit to) and (2) the public isn’t promised any number of personal photos at all of the royal family so (3) she’s going to stop submitting photos at all to the public and they’ll just have to settle for either the rare official ceremony ones that the royal family commissions from time to time or paparazzi ones taken very far away in blurs from now on. Fuck this entitlement that the public needs to be fed photos from her personal cell phone or whatever. If they can’t trust her not to doctor them in exactly the same ways regular people do to their iPhotos, then they’ll get none at all from her.
well, a friend did tell me that the hot new internet theory is her husband killed her and they're keeping it covered up until current king dies and he can take the throne and be immune to prosecution for the murder. it makes so much sense.
Also known as the Trump Gambit.
Don't take the bait...her imminent return is already triumphant lol.
The latest news is that Kate's face in the doctored photo seems to have been lifted from her Vogue cover photo from eight years ago. It seems to be a perfect match. Her pre-operation photos show her looking much older than she does in the doctored photo. Maybe she looked so haggard post-surgery that she was afraid people would think she was on death's door.
This is the most reasonable explanation I’ve seen so far.
If the Crown has money to spend on Adobe Cloud and Kate has time to futz around with Photoshop, maybe they also have money to hire an immaculate expert to do the work for her.
However, suggesting that no expert did this, is way too easy and simplistic of a claim. People have a range of skills and attitudes in Photoshop, from the semi-casual expert who might not care for tiny artifacts that belie doctored photos to the extreme expert who regularly shares macro shortcuts and admonishes anyone who dares to do destructive edits.
This has to be the most intriguing British disappearance since the "Paul is dead" rumors of 1966. To find out what really happened, maybe we should be playing Strawberry Fields Forever backwards.
But it's a new age, of course. The truth may lie anywhere between "Kate is dead" and "Kate is not dead and never existed in the first place." Really, if Kate were nothing but a sim created in a computer program, or an AI that Sam Altman built under contract for MI6, are you sure you could tell the difference? (Count her fingers!)
Speculation has been rampant, and I know what you're thinking. Pretty soon, we'll find out the truth that Catherine, Princess of Wales, has been engaged with Satanic child molesters operating a sex trafficking ring in league with the Biden crime family to defeat Donald Trump.
I was wondering what they'll call it when the news finally comes out. Then, there it was, staring us all right in the face:
Canon?
C-anon?
Catherine-anon?
The pieces are just beginning to come together. Stay tuned.
Why didn't she just increase the aperture so the depth of field was deeper?
Maybe I'm missing something, but how is someone mildly touching up a family photo now the Scandal of the Century™? I could see if she had clearly photoshopped an old photo of herself into the picture such that the image there was clearly not a current one or something, but JFC, slightly repositioning a hand? Who gives a shit? She looks fine. The kids look cute. I agree the way the palace has handled news about her surgery and long absence from public appearances has been odd, to say the least, but the global freakout over some very minor touchups on a family photo is just insane.
I can't get two kids to smile at the same time for a family photo. Three? No chance.
This is the most likely answer. She wanted to get the final picture to have her kids (and her) all looking their best. That also thew reason for not coming clean about the pictures combined; because then the world will nitpick whatever goofy expression one of the kids was making in the various takes. The banality of the reason and the world's insane overreaction are not a high point for Western civilization.
The conspiracy garbage that led to posting the picture was absurd. When the Princess of Wales had her surgery, it was announced that she would not make any official appearances until after Easter.
That's March 31, more than two weeks away.
So why did anyone wonder where she was and why she wasn't out and about? She's recuperating from abdominal surgery!
I'm ready for it to blow over. Who cares? And lets learn a lesson -- royal news is not news because royals don't do anything of note. Or even anything not of note.