Fake!

Not sure about posting this, but the following picture, taken on my old Optio 33lf, has had nothing added or taken away. However...



Some background. I wanted to do a silly picture, based on something I did a few years ago for another forum. The silliness being it's taken with a Pentax camera (eligible for this forum) of a camera from pre-Ricoh Imaging days (so not eligible) of a Ricoh building that had nothing, as far as I know, with the Imaging side of the company. Unfortunately, the images I managed to take (the building is no longer used by Ricoh) didn't quite make it, so...

And the fakery? Well, in the original image, the LCD screen was completely washed out, due to the direction the building faces and so on. So I took the top part of the image, shrank it and overlaid it on the LCD screen part. And the background was clear and in focus, so it got selected and blurred using the Blur/Lens Blur option.

There are three obvious giveaways - the image on the LCD is not quite right and is also a degree or so off. And there is one area that should be blurred but isn't. I left these in so that the fakery is not completely hidden. An expert could also probably tell from the EXIF data.

Sorry for going on about it but there is a serious point here, I think. Had I better PSE skills and/or spent more time on the image, I could possibly have passed it off as genuine. As I also found a simple way of replacing the EXIF data using PSE, I could even have passed it off as a K10D picture.

I suppose there may be a lot of this sort of thing going on in commercial photography, I just hope it doesn't in big competitions.

It's a composite and, as far as I know, as long as you are the author of all the elements, it would be allowed in competitions

It depends on the competition. Some insist on original unaltered images.

Remember the hoo ha about the fake that won a Nikon comp with a plane flying overhead?
Plenty of fakes in wildlife and landscape photography too, though none quite as blatant as the stuffed anteater one which didn't require much PS.
The winner of the Countryfile calendar comp was not all it seemed, but no PS there to alter the image ifaik.

Anyway it is a fun thing to do and passes a few hours, whilst improving your editing skills.
Is that the Ricoh office in Staines? A friend worked there for a while.

Yeah, that one. It's now occupied by a company called IFS - some sort of software company.

I must admit, I'm in two minds about photo editing and competitions . OK, cropping, straightening, removing colour casts, maybe a bit of work on brightness/contrast and removing spots and such, possibly the odd small distraction, a bit of sharpening after re-sizing. But further than that is, I think, iffy. To say the least.