Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio. And how the tech are you? It is time for another classic episode. We're actually doing a follow up to last week's classic episode. This week's episode is Photo Editing and Manipulation, Part two. Originally published on September two, two thousand fifteen. Dylan was a guest host on this show. He is now a managing executive producer with I Heart, so he's stuck with us and has done incredible work. The guys very busy. But way back then we had him on as a guest to talk about photo manipulation and yeah, I hope you enjoy this classic episode. Images on computers, that's nothing new, We've had those for quite some time. I would argue that perhaps the pivotal moment in the post digital era would be nineteen eighties seven. That's when you have a PhD student at the University of Michigan named Thomas Noel who builds a program for the Mac Plus. He calls it display. Oh yeah, yeah, display. Everyone's using that these days, but they are They just don't know. Yeah, they just it's just not called that anymore. Yeah. So in he and his brother John Noel. John Noel was an effects expert a little company called Industrial Light and Magic. Yeah so a little, little known Hollywood effects studio, just one of the smaller ones. Yeah. So that they put their heads together and together they come up with an idea. They decided to rename display and they call it Photoshop, and they license it to a manufacturer of slide scanners, and the manufacturers called Barney Scan. So the very first version of Photoshop, which was not version one point, oh, it preceded version one point. It was version zero point eight seven. It was included with about two hundred scanners. So are about two hundred editions of Photoshop zero point eight seven out there? Wow, that's a yeah, I guess. And in nineteen nine they would sign a distribution deal with Adobe, and thus the relationship with Adobe and Photoshop begins. Was also when we get a famous incident of photo manipulation, a huge slap. I would say, this was a TV guide cover. I don't know if you're particularly familiar with this instance. It is Oprah. Yes, so this was pretty awful. I would say, yeah, So, what what happened was TV Guide puts Oprah on the cover. That's not the egregious, nasty, horrible part. That's that's perfectly fine. Was a ratings champion absolutely deserved to be on the cover of TV What what she did not deserve is is the way she was portrayed. So what happened was they had cut her head off of one picture and then superimposed it on top of the body of Anne Margaret and a ten year old photo of Ann Margaret at that from nine yeah, nine seventy nine publicity shot of Anne Margaret, different woman, different race, and the it was immediately recognized by the fashion designer for Ann Margaret, the person who designed the dress and Margaret was wearing in that publicity photo and clearly was the same photo obviously the exact same pose and same body. It just had been manipulated so that it was supposed to like Oprah's body. This was not one of TV Guide's best moments, and it certainly was one of those that really brought the the this photo manipulation uh concept back into the public eye. Keep in mind that a lot of the manipulations we talked about in our first episode. For a really long time, we're not necessarily public knowledge. People weren't aware that a lot of this was happening, you know. I think a lot of people still believed that when you see a photograph, what you're seeing is exactly the way it it rolled out in real life. And I think a lot of people now would still look at some of these photographs from like the eighteen sixties and not know that there was the ability to do manipulations like we're possible, right, So if you were looking at, say some of the spirit photography that we talked about in our last episode, you might be led to believe that somehow the photographers of the nineteenth century had an ability to capture spirits in photographs. They weren't. They use double exposure. Double exposure is no longer a thing. So maybe that's part of the problem, because unless you're using film double exposure like you could, you could digitally create an effect that's like double exposure. You can overlay one layer and photoshop on another and change the opacity. Yes, but as far as putting two pictures on the same piece of film, it's not exactly the same. Yeah, yeah, it's it's I mean, you can you can fake it so that you get the same effect, But it's not it's definitely not the same process. Nine was when Adobe Photoshop one point oh would ship Happy anniversary Photoshop. Hey, there you go. I didn't even make them do the math because in English major don't blame me. So here's here's something that's hard to believe. Adobe Photoshop one point oh fit on a single three and a half inch floppy disk. That's incredible. Yeah, yeah, uh yeah. You think about the size of those those programs now, and well, first of all, we don't use sloppy disks anymore. You know, I don't know if Photoshop still I guess you can still physically, but most people downloaded from the cloud now right, Yeah, you get a digital download and it's sizeable. It would take many three and a half inch disks to hold it. Now, and that Photoshop one point oh contain several of the tools that would later become the standard features of Photoshop. That's pretty amazing to me. Yeah, the clone tool was included in Photoshop one point oh. Yeah, and you you you already had the ability to select certain certain parts of an image and human saturation levels or tones. Thinking since I never used one point. Oh, thinking back and imagining that that was possible back then already in some form is is pretty amazing. Although the great thing about photoshop was that in comparison to its competitors, it was it was easier, more intuitive, and that's the way it was marketed. Right. So keep in mind that when we talked about in Part one, those those those means of manipulating and editing photos, that was a specialized skill. Like if you were not a photographer, chances are you were unaware of how this this trickery or manipulation took place. And it's almost like you can almost think of it like a guild system. It wasn't formal like that, but it was this thing that if you were not part of that club, you were largely ignorant of what was going on in order for that stuff to happen. Uh. This approach meant that it suddenly became much more accessible. It's still had a barrier to entry. There was still a learning curve to be to be conquered, but it was much lower than say having to go and roll in classes in photography and all the chemistry and fault there was. There was no longer chemistry involved, and there was no chemistry in a photo which didn't need to have chemistry, and you didn't have to go into the dark room and stand there with the tools if you wanted to lighten a part of an image or dark end. Yeah. I loved and you're in the part one you talked about the experience of going into a pitch black room in order to manipulate a camera so that you don't expose the film to light, thus ruining the film because obviously the film is as photoreactive. You can't since its photoreactive, any light is going to make it react. And the idea of fumbling around in the dark that first time, where you're trying to build that familiarity, it made me think of every scene in every military movie where someone has to take apart a gun and then reassemble it. It's like it sounds like that, like that, like after after week five or six, you just confidently just you're not even thinking about it's no longer conscious thought. It's just muscle memory. Yeah, and that that's that's great, But it's also great now, as much as I love film photography, to do that on a daily basis is not as easy as taking a digital SLR and putting an SD card slot. Yeah, it turns out that you know, you can even do that with the lights song you can. That's great. So the cool thing also about Adobe Photoshop one point oh is it was being used for some really high profile, uh feature films at the time. There were actual effects studios that were using elements of Photoshop to work on composite digital shots of their films, including movies like The Abyss. So that's James Cameron's big movie that depending on which version you're seeing, you're dedicating about four hours of your life. Too. There's The Rocketeer, which highly underrated fantastic sci fi fantasy film. Yeah, yeah, I remember seeing that one of us really young. It's a great it's a great movie. Go check it off. You haven't seen The Rocketeer, youve got to see The Rocketier. So it's actually a really good superher Row film. It just didn't get adopted by a larger audience the way some of the ones today did. Terminator two was one of the movies that Phomshop one point oh influenced. James Cameron. Ye, so if you uh, if you you know, if you really want to celebrate give photoshop one point, I was very slowly descending thumbs up. And then one of one of a movie that I love despite its flaws, Hook, Steven Spielberg movie. Yeah, the the Steven Spielberg Retelling of Peter Pan, where Robin Williams is a grown up Peter Pan and Dustin Hoffman's Captain Hook. Uh. Dustin Hoffman, by the way, phenomenal Captain Hook, one of my I loved his performance. I wish there were more Hook in the movie Hook, because every time he was on screen, I was happy. It's just pretty phenomenal. Yeah. It was a totally different style of Hook than I was anticipating, and I loved every second of it. Anyway, all of those had influence from photoshop. They were digital composites, and we talked previously in the earlier episode about composite photographs. In that sense, there were composites that were completely made through analog methods where you're literally cutting and pasting either in a negative form or print form and taking a new photograph whatever it may be. But you were putting together two or more images to create a new image that's a composite of those previous ones. Now we're talking about doing the same thing but using digital tools, which gives you a lot more freedom. It does, and in soon thereafter I think three point oh was the introduction of layers, which changes everything. Yeah, you have non destructive editing. Please can you explain what that is? Non destructive editing is a godsend because, uh, I guess when most people maybe open up Photoshop for the first time and they're messing around, you see things like the eraser things that kind of makes sense. Like maybe if you ever opened up a picture in MS paint and you thought, like, I can paint on this, But once you do that, you're you're you're limited by how many times you can hit the undue button. But with layers, um you can continually add on different elements, on on, different on. The best way to say is layers. So it's like putting pieces of paper over one another kind of or clear acetate as maybe and and so if you uh subtract from one part of that layer, if you still have a copy of that underneath, nothing's going to happen to the original part of that image you're and you're still going to have on the bottom layer. If you don't edit that layer the whole image. You're still going to have the whole image. So you have your original as the base, the foundation, yes, and then you lay other layers on top of it. That's where you can do your manipulation. And then you decide, maybe you decide, you know, I took that balloon out, but I actually kind of want that balloon back in. Now that I've done these other edits, I'm gonna go back re add that one layer or undo what I did on that one layer. And now it's as if by magic we get the balloon bag exactly. And and I'm sure a lot of people have noticed that you have at the top of your your application you have different tabs on them is like adjustments, and you can go and you can change the contrast, the saturation, things like that. Well, with adjustment layers, you can add that on and then you can you can turn off that layer and the effect goes away. If you do that through the file menu at the top, it changes the picture permanently. If you can't, if you don't have the back button, if you don't have undo, yeah, yeah, as long as you or or if you avoid saving it, you still have your original. But then what's the point of doing all the work. Yeah, it's a great point. I mean I've often wondered because as someone who has only casually used these editing tools myself, Uh, it took a while for me to figure out what layers were. And um, like I remember specific quickly using them to do things like if I wanted to take an image but remove, like remove an image on a white background, like let's say it's a stock photo of something, and I want to put that image, the image of that thing on some other background and not have a big white box behind it. That's when it was it was useful if that was a layer itself, like I could take the layer that had the object and leave the white background behind, so I could actually put that against a different background and have it look like it meant to it was meant to be. There another huge breakthrough his masks. And if use layers and masks together, you have so much control and and it's you can go backwards or forwards as much as you want in your document. With with masks, you can select a certain part of the image and then you can mask out the rest of it. So you just have that that part selected and then you can use the paint brush to paint and or paint doubt to kind of clean up the lines that you just selected. If you want more of that layer that you just blank part of it out, you can you can erase part of it and you can bring it back in. So layers and mass I think we're big game changers for photo editors and photo manipulators who either used as an art or they used it to deceive whatever you want to use it for. Photoshop was making it possible as we as we have said many times on tech stuff, it's not the tool that's necessarily the issue or the problem. It's the way the tools implemented. And the purpose of these tools was to give greater freedom to people who work in images, and what you do with that freedom is up to the choice of the individual, and in some cases it was to make art. In some cases it was just to clean up an image so that the point that the photographer wanted you to focus on was in fact the most notable element of that image. Like if I'm taking a photo of something and i think like, oh, it's this great background, and I've got a wonderful subject in the foreground, and I'm really concentrating on my subject, and I don't notice that there's some jackass twenty feet back who's you know, waving maniacally into the camera. And then I think, I really don't want that guy there. I mean, you know, just pop open a new layer and photo shop and clone stamp them out. I like the way you think, well, when you see that guy on the street, like I clone stamped you exactly, he doesn't know what you mean. Maybe there's a good chance he has no idea how what what a sick burn, which is essentially saying like I did what I did to you what Stalin did to the commissar, only in the photo sense. Though, you're free to go. We'll be back to talk about more photo editing and manipulation in just a moment after this break. So some other instances of photo manipulation, some of which were not necessarily meant to be uh taken as a representation of the actual person, some of which it's arguable. Texas Monthly Magazine had a great image of Governor Ann richards on a Harley Davidson. That's a great one, and she liked it. Yeah, yeah, she looked great. But if you actually looked in the credit page of the magazine. They they indicate that the motorcyclist was a stock image, and so if you were to take the trouble of looking at the at that credit page, you would see that they don't hide the fact that this was a manipulation. And that's almost become common practices for manipulated covers. Maybe if it's someone's head on someone else's body, yeah, which is a big thing, that it will have a small disclaimer either on the credit page or very small on the bottom of the cover that that it is illustration. Yeah. Yeah. And ninety three that's when photoshop would come to Windows. So finally Windows users were able to stand side by side with Mac users with sixteen bit support. That was that was the big thing that year, I think for Windows. UH. Here's a famous instance of photo manipulation that was a big controversy. This was during UH just in the in the wake of O. J. Simpson being arrested on the charge of murder, and two magazines came out at the same time, both using O. J. Simpsons mug shot. Newsweek had the unaltered mug shot as the cover. Time magazine had a altered version of that mug shot. Yes, they manipulated it to make him appear darker and more menacing, which is I would argue bad photo journalism, and yes, yes, both of those things. It is I would argue indefensible. Yeah, that was one of the things that they show you a most photography history of photograghy classes or yeah, saying quite pointing at that and saying, do not be this person. Yes, it's bad idea. It says a lot. It says a lot of really ugly things about not just the mentality of uh, the editors of the magazine at the time, but also their opinion of the American public and perhaps even by extension, the overall dominant opinion of the American public. Like all of that none of that comes out well in that in that instance, to say that this would be seen as a reasonable use of photo editing and that it would be accepted and that you that's all of that is just ugly and it's unfortunate. Yeah, and it's it's it's good that Newsweek ran the same picture, which is something that I think is is uniquely pre internet kind of saturation, is that that would happen every once in a while that Newsweek or Time would run the same image on their home on their front almost that homepage. Yeah, well, the same image of that world. I will often end up referring to old media with new media terms. And then I realized, like, I've been in this business a while now, and this is this is reality. Now. That's so weird. I remember before there was a worldwide web, um showing my age. All right, And I've got one more specific when I want to talk about, and I'm sure you have some more examples too, But the one that I was thinking of immediately that it kind of ties in in a way, and that has to do with race. Um. So the time image was racist image that was like, again, just terrible photo journalism. The one I was going to mention was an attempt by the University of Wisconsin to demonstrate that they had a diverse student uh population by showing a group of football fans at a game that included a black student in the middle of to the side of several white students all cheering on a football game. The only problem was it was a composite photo. The black students photo had been taken a year apart from the football fans photo, and then the black student had been inserted into the picture in order to perpetuate this idea that the University of Wisconsin had a diverse student body. Yes, and it is bad. And I mean, like the photoshop itself is bad. It does not look like that person is not the same place. There was a publication in Toronto. I think it was for uh. It was like come to Toronto and they were trying to show on the on the cover at a family and so they did the same thing that they did with the Wisconsin cover. And it hits me on two levels, both of these covers that it's it's it's it's it's not good practice, and it it wouldn't have been with all the effort and time that you went through to get those photographs, you could have gotten an actual photograph number one that would have probably been less time consuming just to get a group of people together and say hey, let's let's take your picture. We're gonna pose you here, and if there's a game and we don't take a picture. So it's not very ethical, it's not very well done and like in good taste. And then also like the editing is really bad. You look at it and you know, yeah, I mean even with an untrained eye. It definitely does not look like these photos were taken on the same day because they weren't. They were taking a year apart. And uh, you know the University of Wisconsin. What they said was they said, we do have black students in our student body. We didn't have any photos that represented the diversity, so we made one. Yeah. And and not to get on that soap box, but if you want diversity, do it. Yeah, Like, like, don't create the illusion of it by manipulation of photographs, but put the effort in to get the photograph, the real photograph, get the real diversity of the campus. Things like that. Yeah, I agree, it's because because all it takes, even if you do it really really well with the photo manipulation, all it takes is someone who has any knowledge of what's going on to say, yeah, it didn't really happen, and then everything unravels and then you have a pr problem that's way bigger than the perceived lack of diversity. Um. So definitely agree, address the underlying problem of diversity before you start worrying about Uh, you know the brochures you were handing out. That's that's definitely I'm on the same page. Yeah, and and I've all of a sudden thought of like, um. There a lot of examples of of people who have pointed out photos in this this post digital era, people who have experience with photoshop, who work with digital photography fairly extensively, who very quickly can point out when, um, when when less than professional manipulation has taken place, like in some cases, in some cases it's it's fairly obvious even to the casual viewer, and in some cases it takes a little bit more of a trained eye to start noticing the indicators. If it's done really, really well, then theoretically you wouldn't be able to tell like you you you what you could say, well, it's possible that was manipulated. It's also possible that that wasn't manipulated. Some of the well done ones go viral so quickly that it can make the rounds everywhere before someone comes out, even if it's like three hours later, it's already had all the news, you know, and they they're like, oh, hey, I just opened this up a photoshop zoomed in, and I can tell you where they where this picture ends, and this picture begins, and this edit, this is definitely manipulated. Yeah, I suppose if you were to take the greatest pains possible and go pixel by pixel and you had lots of spare time on your hands, you could perhaps create an image that was essentially unbeatable, undetectable. But it's a huge amount of effort in order to do that. You can probably get past a large percentage of the viewing public with a with a decent manipulation job. But they're always going to be those experts out there who are like, they know what to look for, and there's always going to be Now in two thousand and fifteen, there's gonna they're going to be services that you can use that you can upload your image and it's going to tell you whether or not they think it's been digitally altered because they have an algorithm for finding those things out. Which, Yeah, once you have the algorithms, go in there where they're looking at it pixel by pixel, Like they can look at two adjacent pixels and if there's enough of a difference between the two that can't be explained by other elements within the image, then that's a possible red flag. Yeah, Or people who forget to alter their metadata or raise their metadata. There are a lot of ways to find fakes, and more often than not, they're found out pretty quickly. There's also been some pretty embarrassing situations where people have uploaded a photo that they had cropped and uh, and yet the original picture is still accessible through that image, where someone's like, oh, I just expanded it and I saw that your room is a total mess. That would be the less scandalous versions of some of those photos that have made their rounds. Yeah, and then some of them, like you said, are just bad. I mean not to skip around too much, but one of my favorite examples recently has been there have been like a number of photographs of Chinese officials inspecting things that are pretty poorly done. I haven't seen these there there are. There's just one in particular. It's a doctored photo of three local officials inspecting a highway project, uh, where they're not on the road, they're just placed kind of above the road. So it's like, so not only are they inspecting their hovering yeah, like no shadow work, and also it's kind of like a stock photo where they're like, oh, like they have these looks on their face that are like very surprised of how well the progress is going on on the road. They're like, oh gosh, wow, look at this road and it's pretty embarrassing. And when when that's something like that gets out it, yeah, I I definitely and I meant to bring this up when we were talking about stock photography earlier. There's also been several instances of various UM companies or news agencies or political campaigns that have used stock images of people and use them in ways to claim that this is representing a specific individual that isn't the person who posed for the stock photography in order to portray a particular viewpoint or to put forth a story or something along those lines. We've seen that happen a few times where UM people have said this image that you're using to to create this narrative that furthers your cause in one way or another, whether it doesn't matter what side of the political spectrum you're on. This has been done across the board by various people at various times, sometimes not necessarily maliciously, but certainly to mislead they would create. They find the stock image that seems to represent like diversity would be a good one. They I've seen this happen a couple of times and people point out, actually, that's a stock image. That's not a picture of their employees or their campaign. That's not that's not a representative of that group. That's actually just a stock photo. And here's where you can find it. Yeah, like you took this crowd and you put it with this picture of you, and that crowd didn't actually come to your event. Um, so do you really have the support that you say that you have, or uh, even on a stock photo. But one I think that you could get from an image database and put two photos together that was pretty famous is back in two thousand four when there was the image of John Kerry sitting next to Jane Fonda at an anti vietnamm A protest. Yeah, and that that I think back in two thousand four, it took a little bit longer for that news to be made public that it was fake, where now I think it would it would circle background pretty quickly. But that was that was an image that I think a lot of people looked at and thought, wow, that looks that looks legitimate. That really looks like they're sitting there together, that they had a closer relationship than they actually had a lot of people do that for either positive or negative, to take pictures of themselves and put them with famous p for either a positive or a negative connotation. Yeah, this kind of also leads into a more lighthearted version of people using photoshop for this kind of purpose. It's my favorite, I mean, it's my favorite thing about photoshop. Ever, It's my favorite way that people use photoshop. I mean, I I appreciate again the technical skill and artistry that is required for you to make good use of photoshop and not make it look crappy, because I do not have that skill. If I use photoshop, it's gonna look like I use fingerpaints to cover up a smudge or something. But I love with a with a passion that is difficult to describe. The funny uses of photoshop people will do when someone presents a photo and they have a request. But this happens a lot on Reddit, where they say, here's a picture I took, this is what I wanted. Can someone photoshop this for me so that this outcome happens. And the friend is for people to do ridiculous photoshops that that uh end up fulfilling the letter of what the person asked for, but not the spirit of what they asked for. I love that. It's it's like, can you put I don't have a picture of me and my cat together? Can you put me in my cat in the same picture? And then like someone will make the cat huge and the guy tiny. Yeah, yeah exactly, or they'll they'll like just uh, you know, end up having like half a cat on the picture and the other half the cat is on the other side of the picture, and just just sometimes sometimes the results are terrible, like like terrible as in oh, and sometimes they're just funny. My favorite one that I've seen recently, uh And I mentioned this to you a couple of days ago when we were talking about this podcast was one where it was a guy standing next to the Eiffel Tower and he had his hand up in the air, and what he had wanted was the photographer to take a picture so that the perspective made it look as if he had his hand on the top of the Eiffel Tower. Classic Eiffel photo, classic leaning tower photo. Yeah, exactly, get it. The one that you know, everyone's gotta have one, right, I would be the guy who would want the photo to be taken incorrectly on purpose, like I would like I'd want to be the guy next to the lean tower piece. I had my hands up and there's clearly like three ft of space between direction exactly like yeah, I'm not I'm not even on the right side of the tower or something like that, because I think that's funny because so many people have done the other one. So this one I saw where the guy said, could you photo shop this so that my hand is on the top of the Eiffel Tower. Obviously people had a lot of fun with it. I think my favorite was one where it made guy had had done I shouldn't say a guy might have been a lady. I have no idea that the manipulator um made made the guy's arm look like Mr. Fantastic or plastic uh. And it was not done subtly or like like. It was very cartoonishly where it looped around all over the photo until the palm was on the top of the Eiffel Tower. Now clearly what the guy had meant was, can you reduce the size of the Eiffel Tower in the perspective of this photo and then edge it over to the side so that my hand is on top of it, but that's obviously not what the redditors provided. And that's just one example and just one example of one request. There are entire threads of these sort of things, and they always make me laugh because people are so creative, Like, yeah, it takes a certain level of skill to do photoshop badly on purpose. Within itself, it is I wanna argue yes and indeed, and it kind of also goes back to something that came out of a very tragic event but led to ridiculous examples of photoshop. The famous example of the guy on the top of the World Trade Center UM on September eleven, two thousand one one of the most famous manipulations they can think of the modern age. Yeah, so it's you know, you've price scene it. It's the guy who's waving and then in the background you see the plane headed for the World Trade Center and um, this was not this was a manipulated photo. The plane was not there in the original photo. And as a meme, people started to use photoshop to cut the guy out of the picture and put him in other various like disaster scenarios like the Hindenburg or JFK JFK or volcano exploding, or sometimes would be movies, like there would just be a still from a movie and this guy would just be popped up in the back, and I love that. It's like, what are some other things that have made that big events throughout history that we can just put this person there. And part of you feels badly for the guy because it's not like like he was just posing for a picture on top of the World Trade Center and then somebody manipulated, presumably I don't think it was him manipulated the picture so that there was this plane in the background. Um, and then suddenly he becomes the center of a me even he's not necessarily the person who did the manipulation in the first place, but at any rate, maybe he has a good sense of humor about it. I don't know. It's very very weird thing to have happened to you. I don't know how I would feel if my image started This is not an invitation, listeners, I don't know how I would feel if my image started popping up everywhere. Go for it. Go for it. Dylan and I have a bit more to say about photo editing and manipulation after this quick break. Now, Dylan Dean are you aware of our super fan, Aaron Cooper. I am not so. Aaron Cooper has done tons of photo editing, various stuff you should know, text stuff for thinking folks. All the posters in Studio A, all of those are his work. So like Holy Monty Python, the Holy Grail featuring the people from How Stuff Works. That's you know, this is Aaron Cooper's I commend you on that is very good he's done. He's done a couple of Star Wars ones for me because he did one with where I was Luke and Chris Palette was lay up, and then when Lauren came in as my co host, he replaced Chris with Lauren. But then he put Chris in the background as a ghost O BI one version and I thought I was brilliant. And then when I when when Lauren left the show, he wrote me and said I'm not doing another one. Said I don't blame you man, You've done You've done more than your share. But he is an example of the people who like to use photoshop in order to make a joke and make a statement and show his appreciation for something that he really enjoys. And so big props to Sea. I think that his work is great and I'm glad to put a name with someone who's made me laugh quite a few times in this studio. Yeah, it's it's great stuff. And uh, I'll definitely show you when this show is over, I'll show you the pictures he's done for tech stuff. Are there any other famous examples of photo manipulation manipulation you'd like to talk about? Well, speaking of Star Wars, Uh, In two thousand and eight, Uh, there was Iranian missile test. Yeah, and um, it was an image released of the missile tests that a bunch of news outlets picked up and it didn't take long for someone to realize that, uh, two of the missiles in the tests that were being launched have been replicated, so it's the same missile twice. And the internet had a field day with it. And it eventually ended up that someone put a bunch of missiles going off in in opposite directions they were they were going in both directions, kind of shooting into each other. There's smoke everywhere, and then the very bottom of the frame there's a jar jar banks just his head and uh, you know, fast forward four years, another uh, Iranian news outlet picks up that picture, the edited picture for their website on an article about Iranian missile tests. So someone just searched for a picture of the tests and found the wrong one. Yeah, and so like good enough. Yeah, that's um, that's unfortunately we we know obviously we have seen images that people have presented as as being genuine without actually knowing that there had been manipulation. It doesn't always mean if someone spreads these kind of photos around, it doesn't always mean that they are aware of the of the manipulation. They may be victims of that manipulation, and then they further perpetuated by sharing it. It's very easy to lose original credit on the Internet because things are passed around. Even even things that you can verify fairly easily can still spread. A famous example which will finally, I think, be put to bed this year, We're almost there. October is so close. The image of the digital Redoubt and back to the future too. I've seen that manipulated to be at least five different dates. Yeah, at least sometimes more than once a year. Like there, I would say at least since two thousand and ten, I've seen quite a few. And it is it's in October this year, folks. So once we get past October, I think that will be the end of its. Once we get past October and everyone has self licing shoes and hoverboards. Uh you know, just remember they don't work on water unless you got power, unless you got that Lexus hoverboard. H that's right, the Lexus one. It's different yea that that includes uh, super cool magnets that you want to be real careful with that one. UM. But I think one of the issues that's pretty prevalent these days with photo manipulation is UM magazine covers and yes, I and UM. And there's been a couple of breakthroughs in the past few years on kind of raining that in because I'm sure that everyone's seen this and and it's easy to tell that these photos have been manipulated just because whose skin is that perfect and things like that, whose waste is that small? Especially if you if you see any like casual photo of especially now that UM, we we have a flood of photos hitting our social networks that are taken from the subjects themselves, and you start to see what they really look like. These and I'm not saying that they are unattractive at all, I'm talking like, you know, everyone from supermodels to actors, to authors to whatever. You see what they really look like, and then you compare that to the magazine version of them, the magazine cover version, and sometimes they look like two totally different people. Yeah. And also it's a lot of the originals get leaked and people make, you know, comparisons where they overlay the original with the edit and you can see all of the work that they've done, the perceived flaws that have been corrected. And in two thousand nine there was a really extreme case from Ralph Lauren Uh they edited one of their models to have just possibly in human proportions, just a tiny, tiny waist, just very small arms, and and there was a big backlash and that that kind of that wasn't exactly the change of tide. But in the years following UM there have been such instances as in two thousand twelve, Israel became the first country to require advertisements to say when they were digitally manipulating photos to make people appear thinner. UM. It also set like a minimum boss mat body mass index that the models could have to ensure that no underweight models were used in advertisements. So there was actually like a not a weight limit, but in body mass limit. Yeah. And then um, there was a teenager that started a campaign, uh, that wanted seventeen magazine to stop retouching their models in two thousand twelve, and seventeen magazine made like an eight point packed that said that they would never change body or face shapes and that they will only use models who give the perception of health healthiness. Right. So, in other words, in order to not perpetuate an unrealistic ideal of physical beauty or to create this kind of unhealthy, uh, unhealthy obsession with images that may in fact be unattainable because they've been manipulated to the point where this is not representative of what a human being looks like. Yeah, and just make people feel really bad about themselves. Yeah, I remember. Of course, there have been several Dove advertisement campaigns that have shown the process of taking a model, and they take the subject and show the whole process from going from the way she looks before any anything's been done to the wardrobe and makeup and hair process, which already changes her appearance significantly from what she looked like before. Then if the photography process, then the editing process in the photography where they make even further changes to her appearance and then do the side by side and say that you know, this is an example of of how the the industry, the beauty industry, has created this unrealistic and and possible, you know, damaging image of what beauty is. So in some instances, hopefully if it doesn't get if it doesn't cease it completely, there at least disclaimers, there's at least some there's someone, there's a watchdog of some sort kind of looking out for things like this. UM. But like I think I said earlier, there's also this this this feeling I think now from people who are inundated with so many photographs UM, and that there's just this different access to photography and that you're you see so many ads every day, you you go to so many websites that um, any photograph that you see is is going to still have edits, and that people are probably going to feel awkward if they don't see the edits that they might they might expect from an image just right out the camera, the changing the contrast, fixing the exposure, correcting the color. Like we've gotten to a point now where a lot of the cameras inside phones. The apps have software that auto automatically do certain enhancements to contrast or lighting, or to make sure that things like red eye aren't a problem. That kind of stuff, or in the past few years, you know, putting the hashtag no filter on your Instagram photo when you haven't put a filter that changes the quality of the photos. That that kind of that that's kind of interesting. Yeah, I I never I never really use filters occasionally like Google Google Photo, well once in a blue moon. And I don't know what the algorithm chooses as the criteria for this, but will single out an image and do an auto enhancement and show you what it looks like, and it doesn't automatically share it. You actually have the option to say, you know, that's fine, awesome, forget it. But I took a picture of my dog when I was walking my dog in the woods of North Georgia. We're right next to a river, and I just wanted to take a picture of my dog because he had never seen a river before, so this was a neat experience for him. He was incredibly cute. He was flipping out. Yeah, it was great. So I took a picture of him, and I have an Android phone, so my photos automatically back up to my Google Photo account and I get a message a little bit like eater and it says I've got an enhanced image of my dog. So I pull it up and it has added filters, so it looks almost like in a painting, almost like a painting style. Um to the point where I said, if this looked a little bit more like a painting, it would be exactly the sort of thing you would see in like a doctor's waiting room. Yeah, very rockwelly and kind of thing. And so, uh, you know, it's it's interesting we've reached this point now where the photo manipulation, uh is happening on its own, like due to algorithms. It's not even necessarily a human that's responsible for it. Yeah, and I know you know something about Google deep dreaming. I'm not too familiar with what exactly what it does, but is there a quick way that you could break it down? Sure? Google deep dream the the purpose of it deep dream itself is kind of an extension of what the purpose was. The purpose was to look at an image and I'll grow them, examines an image and looks for examples of areas of that image that it can enhance so that you can see stuff in greater detail. So, uh, maybe there's um like a blurry photo of someone's face. It might be able to bring those features into more more of a sharp appearance that you can actually see who that person is and it was. You know, it could be used for anything. It could be used for facial recognition. It could be used just to make an image look nicer. It could be used to um to to look at old photos and see if you can figure out, like imagine opening up a cold case. You've got this photograph of a face, and you've never been able to identify that person. Use this technology to try and see if it can at least make a guess as to what that person actually looks like. That's the sort of thing it does. So in a way, it's like the old science fiction zoom and enhance, you know, that old, good old TV trope. It's like that, but again it's making guesses. It's trying to fill in gaps where data does not exist, So it's looking for patterns. It's looking to try and insert information into those patterns that would make the most sense, which means that sometimes it makes mistakes. Well, the deep dream part is is cranking that up to like eleven. It's like oversaturating a photo. It's like making all the colors bleed, except in this case, what it's doing is it's saying, Hey, you know that pattern recognition you have where you're looking for stuff that looks like a face or whatever, or looks like a a plant or a dog or a lizard, whatever it may be. I'm going to turn that way up so that now you're going to be looking for that even harder. So anything that remotely looks like one of those things, you're going to interpret that as a representation, and then you're going to fill in the gaps. Be like, hey, what if that recognition software got real into psychedelic rock. Yeah. So if you look at these Google deep dream images, some of them like there's there's one in particular that's really good at finding dog faces and everything. So you might take a picture of a table that has a really interesting wood grain to it and you throw it through this Google Google deep Dream and it just finds dog faces everywhere, and it starts filling in the information so that now it's just an hple of craft Ian horror show of a table covered in dog faces um or like there are a lot of pictures of like again taking pictures of dogs where you look at the picture of the dog and it's looking at patterns in the fur, and suddenly you see like all these other faces of dogs emerging from these patterns of fur, and it definitely starts to feel like you are in a trippy nightmare scenario, like a nightmare, but you can close the browser window. Yeah, so I'm sure that Salvador Dali would have said this is amazing and it should be included on all cameras and you should never be able to turn it off. Yeah, because it is that kind of trippy sort of experience. It's all based again on on pattern recognition, only in this case it's recognizing patterns that are not really representative of the thing. It interprets the mess. It's very much the same thing as looking up at the clouds and seeing a face. Now it's it's we humans do this all the time. We see patterns where there really isn't a pattern, Like we we recognize what appears to be a pattern in something that's largely a chaotic system. Same sort of thing, and it's actually pretty fascinating. It's a kind of artificial intelligence in a way. And that wraps up this classic episode of tech Stuff. Hope you enjoyed it. Thanks again to Dylan for joining me, you know, seven years ago to talk about photo manipulation and editing. Obviously, the tools today are even more sophisticated, far more sophisticated than they were seven years ago. Uh, and it is phenomenal what can be done. Frightening in many ways, what can be done with photo and video editing and manipulation. So maybe at some point I will do a follow up episode on this and kind of talk about sort of the huge leaps in capabilities that we've seen since, because it's pretty remarkable. But until then, if you would like to suggest a topic for me to cover on tech Stuff, there are a couple of different ways you can reach out. One is you can download the I Heart radio app, navigate over to tech Stuff, use that little microphone icon that'll let you leave a message up to thirty seconds in length telling me what you would like me to cover. Or you can reach out to me on Twitter. The handle that we use for the show is tech Stuff hs W, and I'll talk to you again. Release soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. 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