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An aside but… does this strike anyone else as a manipulated photo? Look at the faces and the railing. https://i.natgeofe.com/n/80ed3002-9183-4d1c-9b6b-6f27eea2

by tobr 3y ago

An aside but… does this strike anyone else as a manipulated photo? Look at the faces and the railing. https://i.natgeofe.com/n/80ed3002-9183-4d1c-9b6b-6f27eea2dd29/GettyImages-548146913.jpg?w=3600 https://i.natgeofe.com/n/80ed3002-9183-4d1c-9b6b-6f27eea2dd2...

mikestew 3y ago
Though I'm curious about the horrible industrial accident that Pigman was involved in, I think a lot of it is just bad lighting. That sun glaring through the window is going to make a tough time of it for any camera, let alone 70 years ago. It wasn't unusual to go back and "enhance" photos with a brush (hence the phrase "air brushing"), so I'm going to guess that someone tried to fix a bad lighting choice post-production.
sdflhasjd 3y ago
It's definitely been manipulated, I was originally thinking AI upscale, but look at the top right of the turbine, details have been painted on. Some OG photoshop going on
- chefandy 3y ago
  It's 100% AI "enhancement." Zoom in and look at their bizarro alien pig faces. I've got easily 10k hours in photoshop and have used generative AI tools enough to spot their signature screwups. I love the photos in National Geographic because they represent the real world, even if they're color and contrast corrected. Considering how photography-focused National Geographic has been in the past, I'm actually pretty disappointed to see such a sad, hamfisted attempt at photo restoration from them. Ugh.
  - CommieBobDole 3y ago
    If it was AI enhancement, the entire image would have bizarre artifacts, which it doesn't. It's likely that the faces were washed out by the light and the original photographer many years ago 'enhanced' it by scratching some facial features into the developed photographic plate, which was pretty common at the time. It probably worked because nobody made giant prints of the photo until now when it was scanned at high resolution.
    - chefandy 3y ago
      > If it was AI enhancement, the entire image would have bizarre artifacts, which it doesn't. a) That's absolutely not always the case with current tooling, especially professional NN-driven tooling from Adobe and the like. b) This isn't an ai-generated image-- these tools just create detail where there isn't detail. What it has to add to reconstruct a railing, flat surface, or repeating pattern is a lot more straightforward than trying to reconcstruct a blurry face. > It's likely that the faces were washed out by the light and the original photographer many years ago 'enhanced' it by scratching some facial features into the developed photographic plate, which was pretty common at the time. c) Those faces aren't scratched out anything. The shapes are far too organic and unnatural looking. Those forms and misinterpretations of what's there are absolutely AI-generated. I'd bank my retirement on it. I've done this work professionally, and I've been doing photo manipulation for 30 years.
      - sdflhasjd 3y ago
        The pigfaces are in the getty "original", but it doesn't display any metadata about when it was digitized annoyingly. https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/turbine-of-a-hydroelectric-plant-at-the-niagara-falls-1924-news-photo/548146913?adppopup=true https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/turbine-of-a...
        eesmith 3y ago
        The image was used in a 2017 article at https://scienceworld.scholastic.com/issues/2016-17/011617/icy-ascent.html?language=english https://scienceworld.scholastic.com/issues/2016-17/011617/ic... and with the same artifacts so digitization must have been before then.
      - tobr 3y ago
        There are obvious scratch/pen marks on the right side of the “pig face”, so I think the simplest explanation is that the nose happened the same way.
  - tobr 3y ago
    I agree it’s disappointing that a publication like National Geographic doesn’t highlight that the photo is manipulated, even if it is a non-digital retouching job. As to how it happened, considering the image has obvious brush or pen strokes in many places, my bet is that’s all it is. The photo was overexposed and details were blown out in the highlights. Someone tried to add it back, resulting in these strange distorted faces. It did look like upscaling artifacts to me at first, but then you wouldn’t have crisp legible text in the same photo. Still, photo manipulation is photo manipulation, and the reasonable doubt in this discussion is a good example of why it should have been pointed out from the beginning.
BizarreByte 3y ago
It could be down to terrible lighting conditions, very slow film back in the day (low iso), and the men moving. It’s possible something happened in the darkroom, but that’s less likely. You can actually see painted details in the image if you look close.
thrdbndndn 3y ago
For what it's worth, a thumbnail from the the source, ullsteinbild.de (which Getty sourced from): https://www.ullsteinbild.de/thumb.php/00291799.jpg?eJwljLsOwjAQBP9l6xR-JNi-DrkJEgEJIwEVOohNgygIqRD_zmGq0eyu9o24BBW-T7lB7EGA8AjSglPFegUygo2U-XE7zxPLZhBTygTtQvjpvm5TnaYIagXDP5Pq9Zzl_5BqsAM5pRpsRdGxb7O2zubRaG9G54q4v3J38WzLAp8vVpQnQg~~ https://www.ullsteinbild.de/thumb.php/00291799.jpg?eJwljLsOw... (I want to link to the page, but their website was so shit it does not offer that. The best I can do is the "search result" I was using: https://www.ullsteinbild.de/?82231788017539342720 https://www.ullsteinbild.de/?82231788017539342720 .)

by tobr 3y ago

mikestew 3y ago

Though I'm curious about the horrible industrial accident that Pigman was involved in, I think a lot of it is just bad lighting. That sun glaring through the window is going to make a tough time of it for any camera, let alone 70 years ago. It wasn't unusual to go back and "enhance" photos with a brush (hence the phrase "air brushing"), so I'm going to guess that someone tried to fix a bad lighting choice post-production.

sdflhasjd 3y ago

It's definitely been manipulated, I was originally thinking AI upscale, but look at the top right of the turbine, details have been painted on. Some OG photoshop going on

chefandy 3y ago
It's 100% AI "enhancement." Zoom in and look at their bizarro alien pig faces. I've got easily 10k hours in photoshop and have used generative AI tools enough to spot their signature screwups. I love the photos in National Geographic because they represent the real world, even if they're color and contrast corrected. Considering how photography-focused National Geographic has been in the past, I'm actually pretty disappointed to see such a sad, hamfisted attempt at photo restoration from them. Ugh.
- CommieBobDole 3y ago
  If it was AI enhancement, the entire image would have bizarre artifacts, which it doesn't. It's likely that the faces were washed out by the light and the original photographer many years ago 'enhanced' it by scratching some facial features into the developed photographic plate, which was pretty common at the time. It probably worked because nobody made giant prints of the photo until now when it was scanned at high resolution.
  - chefandy 3y ago
    > If it was AI enhancement, the entire image would have bizarre artifacts, which it doesn't. a) That's absolutely not always the case with current tooling, especially professional NN-driven tooling from Adobe and the like. b) This isn't an ai-generated image-- these tools just create detail where there isn't detail. What it has to add to reconstruct a railing, flat surface, or repeating pattern is a lot more straightforward than trying to reconcstruct a blurry face. > It's likely that the faces were washed out by the light and the original photographer many years ago 'enhanced' it by scratching some facial features into the developed photographic plate, which was pretty common at the time. c) Those faces aren't scratched out anything. The shapes are far too organic and unnatural looking. Those forms and misinterpretations of what's there are absolutely AI-generated. I'd bank my retirement on it. I've done this work professionally, and I've been doing photo manipulation for 30 years.
    - sdflhasjd 3y ago
      The pigfaces are in the getty "original", but it doesn't display any metadata about when it was digitized annoyingly. https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/turbine-of-a-hydroelectric-plant-at-the-niagara-falls-1924-news-photo/548146913?adppopup=true https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/turbine-of-a...
      - eesmith 3y ago
        The image was used in a 2017 article at https://scienceworld.scholastic.com/issues/2016-17/011617/icy-ascent.html?language=english https://scienceworld.scholastic.com/issues/2016-17/011617/ic... and with the same artifacts so digitization must have been before then.
    - tobr 3y ago
      There are obvious scratch/pen marks on the right side of the “pig face”, so I think the simplest explanation is that the nose happened the same way.
- tobr 3y ago
  I agree it’s disappointing that a publication like National Geographic doesn’t highlight that the photo is manipulated, even if it is a non-digital retouching job. As to how it happened, considering the image has obvious brush or pen strokes in many places, my bet is that’s all it is. The photo was overexposed and details were blown out in the highlights. Someone tried to add it back, resulting in these strange distorted faces. It did look like upscaling artifacts to me at first, but then you wouldn’t have crisp legible text in the same photo. Still, photo manipulation is photo manipulation, and the reasonable doubt in this discussion is a good example of why it should have been pointed out from the beginning.

BizarreByte 3y ago

It could be down to terrible lighting conditions, very slow film back in the day (low iso), and the men moving. It’s possible something happened in the darkroom, but that’s less likely. You can actually see painted details in the image if you look close.

thrdbndndn 3y ago

For what it's worth, a thumbnail from the the source, ullsteinbild.de (which Getty sourced from): https://www.ullsteinbild.de/thumb.php/00291799.jpg?eJwljLsOwjAQBP9l6xR-JNi-DrkJEgEJIwEVOohNgygIqRD_zmGq0eyu9o24BBW-T7lB7EGA8AjSglPFegUygo2U-XE7zxPLZhBTygTtQvjpvm5TnaYIagXDP5Pq9Zzl_5BqsAM5pRpsRdGxb7O2zubRaG9G54q4v3J38WzLAp8vVpQnQg~~ https://www.ullsteinbild.de/thumb.php/00291799.jpg?eJwljLsOw... (I want to link to the page, but their website was so shit it does not offer that. The best I can do is the "search result" I was using: https://www.ullsteinbild.de/?82231788017539342720 https://www.ullsteinbild.de/?82231788017539342720 .)