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September 29, 2006

Hivemind: Real or Photoshopped?

spring break, originally uploaded by yeowoman1970.

Michelle Malkin says this picture is a composite.

What do you think?

Update: It's officially a fake. Check it out and see if you were right about what was convincing or unconvincing in the picture.

A lot of people said the head was too small to be real, but the real woman's head isn't any bigger than the Michelle head appears to be in the picture.

Julia now my Photoshop sensei. She nailed what was wrong with the picture in the first five minutes: Gaussian noise added but not faded back and inconsistent compression artifacts in the face vs. body.


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» A personal aside from Michelle Malkin


Photoshopped...No way her ass is that small.


OT:>Here's an image for the Sembler expose series, LB.

Photoshop. She has a big head, not a teeny little one.

The head size is a little off, but the skin tones are amazingly consistent. She appears to be arching her back and jutting her hips forward, so maybe her head just looks smaller because it's further away from the camera.

The angle looks wrong to me.' Not sure why, but unless she's got a snake for a neck (not out of the question, obviously), I don't think it works.

Odd neck angle. Skin tone doesn't match. Head is too small. Photoshop and not a good one.

Other people are much more qualified to judge a photoshop job than I am-- it looks convincing to this amateur's eye. However, if you look carefully at her neck, there appears to be a dark line where the head might have been pasted on. Or maybe it's a hickey.

Best comment on Wonkette about this:

If it were in keeping with tradition, that would be her head merged on the body of her husband.

Are you fucking shitting me?!?! In a bit of a nasty mood today Lindsay? This is probably the kind of shit that made her psycho in the first place.

More to the point, who cares?

The head is waaay too small for the body.

There is another photo of her in the flickr set that doesn't look fake. The other pic is innocuous, just her standing with another woman.

that's no photoshop.
I'm the guy who posted that originally in comments at FDL.
I found the photo at an Oberlin College graduate's flickr site (forget how i got there). The date on the picture is right too.
that's michelle in all her uh glory.

and I forgot to mention, the title of the picture, at the flickr site (which also featuires MM's friends carrying pro-bush signs) is "Michelle cuts loose, spring break".

that's her alright.

For a more technical perspective:
1. If you accept it's her head, then the either her head has been photoshopped onto a different body or the body has been shopped onto an existing head (almost impossible to do). This means that the head would be fake, but looking at the head at a pixel level,

1. The tone mixes on the head and body are exactly the same.
2. Theres no evidence of blending at the neck.
3. Most difficult to fake - the wall color on the right of her head (her left) at the neck level clearly runs behind her hair.

Sure, an expert photoshopper with time to spare could fake all these things, but frankly, who would spend their time doing it to such an ordainary photo when you could pick a nude body and do that?

I vote a real photo.

The face looks like it's lit differently, although I can't quite make out how.

If I over-saturate the image, the face and body colors diverge. If I over-sharpen the image, the face seems to have different noise characteristics.

Finally, there are lines across the picture that look like creases in a print, and I think I also see dust specks, but there's a digital timestamp. A photo of a print? I don't know what that's all about.

Shopped, IMO. Clearly so.

Probably fake, but who cares when it has her in such a tizzy. Now we need shots of Pammy pre-augmentation.

I'm not sure it's even Malkin, just a woman that looks a lot like her.

Um, no, Brad, you don't. There's a picture of her with Bolton that shows her frankenstein-level facelift scars, and you really, truly don't want to go there.

It's fake...proving that Malkin's scholarship and journalism are impeccable.

Suppose it is her, why should she be embarrassed? If it were her, she could just say, “Why yes, I did wear a bikini to the beach fourteen years ago. I had a good time, too.”

Her head is too small for the body. She has a large head to body ratio.

Small head, and it's at the wrong angle.

I say it's a photoshop.

But who cares? Why would anybody think there's anything wrong with this photo anyway?

There's nothing wrong with the subject matter of the photo. That's why it cracks me up that Michelle Malkin is freaking out about it.


I thought those were silk filaments - part of the vicious web of lies she weaves each day.

Well, at least the submitter's name, "yeowoman1970", is entirely reasonable for someone who was a senior at Oberlin in '92.

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