Good Night cigarette and color maroon
When will our do-nothing congress pass comprehensive Photoshop manipulation reform? This handy but by no means exhaustive roundup of doctored news photos contains some surprises: Abe Lincoln's head on the body of pro-slavery stalwart John C. Calhoun; legendary Goodnight Moon illustrator Clement Hurd getting a cancer stick digitally knocked out of his hand; a Mike DeWine campaign poster that reverses the order of the World Trade Center attacks. (How desperate must you be when you have to doctor a 9/11 photo for effect?) Plenty of old friends and a few you probably haven't seen before, but between magical hijabs and Pottygate, there will always be spectacular new photos coming out of this horrific new world of digitally enhanced images. Besides, where else can you find a correction as poetic as this one:
The cover photograph in The Times Magazine on Sunday rendered colors incorrectly for the jacket, shirt and tie worn by Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor who is a possible candidate for the presidency. The jacket was charcoal, not maroon; the shirt was light blue, not pink; the tie was dark blue with stripes, not maroon. The Times's policy rules out alteration of photographs that depict actual news scenes and, even in a contrived illustration, requires acknowledgment in a credit. In this case, the film that was used can cause colors to shift, and the processing altered them further; the change escaped notice because of a misunderstanding by the editors.