BP = Bloody Photoshop
by Patricia Montgomery, LincsMag Writer.
Date: 01 August 2010
Having become in the USA, of recent times, the public enemy number one, BP have made unbelievable public relation mistakes that have left experts and media watchers on both sides of the Atlantic opened mouthed in disbelief. So it just couldn’t get any worse, right?
I mean, like BP would not be daft enough now that the whole world is watching them to make any more stupid mistakes. They just couldn’t with the American public already insulted by recent comments and the White House looking for any excuse it can to divert attention away from it’s own errors in the catastrophic environmental catastrophe. Well BP have!
It seems BP now means Bloody Photoshop, as recent photographs that were on the BP website have been altered with this software. So how did this come to light? Did BP own up due to a conscience? No, it was the website AmericaBlog that highlighted discrepancies between BP images and their original, thus forcing BP to admit that some of the oil spill photographs posted on its website had been altered by staff using Photoshop.
Oh very naughty, and downright stupid in this Internet age. So BP has tried to rectify this disastrous and damaging PR stunt, by uploading the three doctored images and their originals to the photo-sharing site Flickr.
A statement accompanying the set reads:
"One of BP's contract photographers used Photoshop to edit images posted on the bp.com Gulf of Mexico Response web site.
"Typical Photoshop uses include color correction, reducing glare and cropping. This week we learned of two images where cut-and-paste
was also used in the photo-editing process. These cut-and-pasted images have been removed from the bp.com site.
"For the sake of transparency, the original and edited images are presented here for comparison. We have also included an image that
appears cut-and-pasted, but was edited using the color saturation tool to improve the visibility of a projection screen image.
"Although BP is a private company, we've instructed the photographer who created the images to refrain from cutting-and-pasting in
the future and to adhere to standard photo journalistic best practices."
A BP spokesperson, Scott Dean, said the photographer was showing off his Photoshop skills and there was no ill intent. Yeah, right? To deliberately deceive looks to be the aim there and no ill intent for BP.
Picture above is the BP command centre, showing men monitoring 10 screens of serious underwater activity. Pretty good except in the original just underneath you can see that at least three of the screens appeared to be inactive.
Using the Photoshop, it was altered so that all 10 screens seemed to be active but if you look closely you can see that the inactive screens were just filled in with images pulled from the other active screens.
The following is really taking things beyond a simple error.
Above is the altered picture with a beautiful colourful blue sea and men flying above watching the hard work, making the BP helicopter appear to be flying near the damaged Deepwater Horizon rig.
Below is the original version that shows the helicopter is still parked on their helipad. And the sea isn’t as bright and pretty as the faked picture.
