As for the original photo — the post above was just commentary on Anti-CNN and CNN — I have no connection to either organization, and so have no idea where either got the photos used in their respective coverage.

I went to the link you sent above (to this image), but it doesn’t seem to show anything relevant to the debate about the images. The image, while clearly taken in the same place at approximately the same time (and likely by the same photographer), is not involved in either of the images in the set of images in the post above. The people in the shot, the flames on the car — none of it line up with either of the cropped/spliced images in the OP.

I’m also pretty sure the original source wasn’t pakistanidefence.com forum, rather the images were likely re-posted there (without authorization of the photographer who originally sold them to CNN). The only other image on there (this image), which is in line with the images in the OP, is simply a closer crop of the right-hand image in the OP (you can see that the original image was taken and cropped tighter on the subjects.

What I did just realize, and what I hope wasn’t part of the confusion in all of this, is that the image in the OP is captioned as saying that the right-hand side image is the “full image” — which it clearly isn’t. The full image would have been an image showing (from left to right) the car fire, the guy with the briefcase, the trucks, the guy mid-run, the stone throwers, the golden-bar barrier and the dude on the bicycle. I’ve yet to see that full image, but I imagine it exists somewhere though. I’m not sure how relevant the original image is though, as the debate is about the ethics of CNN using the photo (on the left) that cropped the stone throwers out of the image.

I have located the image proving that the photographs on this report were edited (obviously not by yourself). Here is the original photo’s from which they were spliced. The original came from the Pakistani Defence Ministry Website:

http://i1212.photobucket.com/albums/cc456/aftereffect1/Original.jpg?t=1311602895

And here is the site they are located on: (http://www.forum.pakistanidefence.com/lofiversion/index.php/t74001-0.html).

If you could tell me where you found the above images I would be eternally and immensely grateful (so I can locate another news agency falsely doctoring images).

Regardless, this page has been a great help in revealing some of the mistakes/distortions (depending on your viewpoint) of CNN. Thank very much for maintaining an impartial standpoint.

Andrew

The reason a difference in the two photographs is so important is because there was a noted distinction between the news agency’s covering up civil unrest and property damage (for obvious reasons) and if the left image has been doctored then (depending on ‘which side’ doctored it and how) it could be very significant to the impartiality of that media (and thus the next step of my writing). In regards to the image being one piece, the reason I am sceptical (of the original source of the photo and not yourself) is because I got in touch with Mr.Richard Quindry. As a graphic designer you may know he is a well respected Photoshop expert, his reply was;

“I believe that two photos were taken in rapid succession from approximately the same position…I do not believe that they are crops from the same photo. To be sure about anything I’d need to see the original hi-res raw file.”

The reason this is significant is that 50%of the active elements (either the stone throwers or the burning car) may not have even been in the original picture presented to the news agency, meaning one aspect of it would not have been intentionally cropped. Although granted, it is definitely a tiny detail in the grand scheme of things, it is a distinction that I am certain should be clarified in the interest of fairness.

That said, of course they’re ‘photoshopped’ — or digitally manipulated. Every photo that ever makes it into print or online would be processed in a number of ways — contrast adjusted, lighting fixed, cropping, scaling, etc. — that’s what the photo editor’s job is, as it is also his/her job to decide on the cropping to use. If that image is then reused by a different media outlet, it could potentially be reprocessed again in a number of ways. The integrity of an image isn’t decided by its processing, nor not usually even its cropping, but by whether or not the subject matter is true to the events — which is (or rather was) the debate with these two images. The entire point of the discussion around the photo is how the media outlet cropped the photo to display specific elements, not whether or not it was touched by digital photo manipulation. The photo on the left is simply a slightly scaled down (resized) version of the photo on the right, cropped differently. Though there is a chance that we’re looking at two photos taken microseconds apart (which I doubt, but for the sake of argument), that wouldn’t change the overall composition of the photo (fire, trucks, stone throwers). And whether or not a media outlet adjusts the contrast, does a bit of colour correction or levels adjustment, it doesn’t change the overlying argument about the photos being cropped to display drastically different scenes.

And again, as my exercise with the image yesterday showed, they completely line up — there’s no break in the powerlines at all when you upscale the photo on the left by a few percent and then overlay. To better illustrate this, here is another image. If you wish to repeat this, simply:

Take the image from the blog post above. Crop out the two image on either side of the red separating bar and insert them on two separate layers in your graphics program.
With the left image on top, reduce its transparency to 80% and increase the entire layer’s size (both X and Y) by 2.9% (from 100% to 102.9%).
Realign the top layer so it is matched with the layer below.

If you toggle the top layer’s visibility on and off after that you will see that the only variance is in the quality of the two images themselves — a product of multiple JPEG compressions and that these two (cropped and processed) images that were spliced together for the example would have had to have come from different sources.

You said: “… unless the two are a crop of an even larger image” — yes, that’s absolutely true. Obviously both of these images are a crop from a larger image, as neither single image displays all three elements (fire, trucks, rock throwers). The original image would have had all three. It was then taken and cropped into these two images, with the image on the left scaled slightly down (either when the comparative image above was created, or by the source of that cropped image).

http://i1212.photobucket.com/albums/cc456/aftereffect1/Photo2Merge-1.jpg?t=1311261116

As you can see, the bottom half of the picture is purely symmetrical. A perfect match, however the top half of the image suddenly (almost instantly) becomes dis-jointed, suggesting that not only has one of the pictures been cropped but possibly even Photoshopped or ‘tampered with’ in some way (observe the power line at the top of the split within the image).

In fact, as you mentioned, the two pictures are off-centre, something that should certainly not happen if it is the same photograph (unless the two are a crop of an even larger image? In which case there should still be no difference in the light apeture as observed). Here is a my merge with the borders of each picture remaining to highlight the asymmetry.

http://i1212.photobucket.com/albums/cc456/aftereffect1/Photo3Merge_with_border.jpg

I must stress that I came across this anomaly as I am investigating the impartiality of Western media and thus don’t have a side, I purely want to get to bottom of this based on the furor this picture first caused so I can come to a conclusion myself. I suspect that the image above is two ‘snapshots’ in quick succesion of the same image, literally taken within milliseconds of one-another.

Andrew

The lighter overlay portrait-shaped rectangle is a chunk of the left-hand photograph from the image above — overlaid on the right at 72% transparency. All I needed to do to make it line up perfectly was to upscale it by a couple of percent (maintaining the aspect ratio). Sharp eye for noticing the size difference in the source images, but a bit inconsequential I think, as the point is that the media outlets that showed these images intentionally cropped them a specific way to remove aspects of the image that tell a different story — scale is less important than crop.