Princess Kate's family photo released on Mother's Day in Britain can still be seen here, but news agencies including the AP, Reuters, and AFP issued a "kill notice" because there were signs it had been manipulated. The princess later apologized for the "confusion," saying that "like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing." More:
- Reuters reports that broadcasters say metadata shows the image was saved twice in Adobe Photoshop on an Apple Mac.
- The Guardian takes a close-up look at some of the more obvious edits, including Princess Charlotte's knee and sweater. Experts who spoke to Newsweek also spotted problems with the background.
- Hany Farid, a University of California, Berkeley, expert in image analysis, tells the BBC that the image could be "a bad job of Photoshopping," possibly involving a composite of images. "There is a relatively new feature where you have a group of people, the camera identifies them through face detection, and it takes a series of photos in rapid succession," he says. "And invariably what happens when you take a photo of a group of people is somebody has their eyes closed or someone's not smiling, and so what this feature does is it looks at four, five, six, seven, 10 photos, whatever, and composites them together. When it does that it sometimes makes mistakes."