Picture not perfect

The Press Information Bureau of India recently got the Twitteratti’s goat when it posted a picture of Prime Minister Narendra Modi conducting an aerial survey of the flood-ravaged Chennai city. Users lost no time in pointing out the poor Photoshop job on it and soon in circulation were multiple memes that had Modi staring at Gerard Butler’s angry face from 300, Miley Cyrus on the “wrecking ball”, Arvind Kejriwal among many more. The picture was subsequently removed after its authenticity was questioned on social media, but the PIB was already in hot water. The PMO has sought an official explanation since.

While the use of Photoshop to reduce a few inches for a magazine cover (mostly by film stars) is not something new, the digital tool is often used to project a larger-than-life image of celebrities. And thanks to the possibilities of technology, we have seen US President Barrack Obama bowing before Amma in Chennai, tennis legend Roger Federer in all kinds of desi settings — such a hanging from a Mumbai local to riding an elephant, being a snake charmer and more.

And even as users continue to churn more versions of the latest PIB photo of the Prime Minister, photographers in the city share with us some of their favourite Photoshop visuals that were cause for much amusement and live by the words of American photographer Ansel Adams, : “You don’t click a photograph, you make it.”

Mansi Manek, fashion photographer Rihanna’s outfit was hilarious, and all those memes went viral for the ridiculous outfit she wore at The Great Ball of China this year in May. So it was photoshopped to poke fun at the outfit and her weird choice of fashion. It’s now a medium to express views. Roger Federer asked his fans to photoshop him in India, and the Internet went crazy with pictures of him in the deserts, on a royal elephant ride, in an auto-rickshaw, in the Ganges, during Holi in Mathura, outside Taj Mahal, at The Golden Temple. That is another recent instance of Photoshopped craziness.

Ritesh Uttamchandani, photojournalist I once photographed Kalki Kochelin for a magazine. The art team at the magazine, while putting the photograph on the page, made a blunder. The photos were superimposed in such a way that in print it seemed like Kalki had some 15 toes. Something like that can be very disappointing for the photographer, where the page designer’s use of Photoshop ends up ruining the picture. That is not acceptable at all.

What PIB did was downright stupid! It defied technology in every manner. Adding detail to a cloud or removing a thumb from an image is a different thing, but this went badly wrong. There were some images during the Israeli conflict that came up, some of them very shoddily Photoshopped. The poor aesthetic taste that the government machinery has is reflected clearly in the working of the government as well.

Gopal M.S. creative director and photographer, Tailor Photoshop blunders in newspapers are very rare. But the social media world is filled with Photoshop gone miserably wrong. The memes and the posters before and during the Narendra Modi elections and campaigns by his supporters were very funny but something of this sort coming from an official twitter handle is not done. Long ago I came across this picture where the Prime Minister was sitting in a Western paradise reading a newspaper with ducks around him! I saw it on Twitter and it was hilarious even though the Photoshop was decently done.

Fawzan Husain, photographer and author There was an image that went viral, it was manipulated to fill in the blanks for the missile that did not fire when shot by the Iranian Army. People use Photoshop for different reasons, sometimes to simply poke fun at issues but this was a serious blunder or I would say a misuse of the medium.

After the Narendra Modi government came to power, the people who work for him have become tech slaves, and his cronies this time have gone a little overboard.

Has he approved of this faux pas or is it the imagination of some babu in the department that has gone terribly wrong This is the moot question!

Chirodeep Chaudhuri,photographer and author PM Modi has been caught before too...remember that picture of him as a sweeper which asked us to salute the man who “once swept floors and is today the most powerful man in India ”.

One of the most scandalous examples was a 2006 Reuters photograph of a bombing in Beirut. The photographer had cloned the smoke to heighten the effect with a bad blotchy Photoshop job. That’s obviously not the point, the important thing was that it was misleading, it was deception. There have been other cases too...I recollect, after the Boston Marathon bombings there were some pictures that had been published that had airbrushed the gore from some of the images. One just might be able to make a case for this but it is still deception. It is just a matter of when the deception is not important enough to lose sleep over (like narrowing the waist of a fashion model for a magazine cover). And then there is propaganda, the secretive North Korean regime has long been suspected of Photoshop fraud.