Air-Force One Photoshopped?

Lots of huffing and puffing over on another blog about claims that a picture of Air Force One flying over the Statue of Liberty have been faked, or photoshopped by the White House.

Proof, if ever there were any, that the Obama administration is as bad as its predecessor, according to those who believe it.

The flyover is already controversial because there were no warnings about it, and in a city which collectively ducks every time it sees a low-flying plane after the tragic events of 9-11, it was a spectacular PR blunder by the new White House staff.

So of course, the conspiracy theorists, especially those with an axe to grind over Obama’s presidency, have jumped on the bandwagon; first there was whinging about the pictures not being released even though they were funded by the taxpayer. Then they were released, which shut those whingers up.

Now come claims that the pictures have been doctored, and that some allegedly slipshod use of the Photoshop cloning tool means there are two flag poles on the island beside the Statue of Liberty.

Doctor, Doctor, Gimme the news...

Except it hasn’t been doctored.

It took me five minutes with Photoshop to show that while there are two similar shaped objects next to each other, one of which is the American flag at the top of it’s pole, the object to the left is not a clone of the flag.

The cloning tool does exactly what it says on the tin, the individual pixels are recreated somewhere else on the canvas, so the pixels of the two objects should be identical. That’s the definition of cloning.

They are not. Having sampled the hue and opacity of all the pixels in both objects, they are very different, which means they cannot have been cloned.

What the claimant has also cleverly done is place a bright pink up-arrow (^) in the space where, if you examine the original, the bottom of the second flag post should be (but isn’t). 

Rather interesting that the original blog post was written by someone called “texasdarlin”, one wonders how close this person lives to Crawford, TX – if this is the best that the anti-Obama camp can come up with after he’s had 100 days in office then they may as well pack up and go home now, and write off the 2012 election right now.

Go back to your lives citizens, nothing to see here…