Forward or Delete: This Week's Fake Viral Photos
Occasionally, against all odds, you’ll see an interesting or even enjoyable picture on the Internet. But is it worth sharing, or just another Photoshop job that belongs in the digital trash heap? Check in here and find out if that viral photo deserves an enthusiastic “forward” or a pitiless “delete.”
Image via YouTube
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Fake X-ray photos have a long and rich history on the internet, but this image depicts a real incident that occurred recently at the border of Morocco and the Spanish territory of Ceuta.
“When they put the suitcase through the scanner, the operator noticed something strange, which seemed to be a person inside the case,” a police spokesperson told AFP. “When it was opened they found a minor, in a terrible state.
According to authorities, the 8-year-old boy’s father—who has residence rights in Europe—paid a 19-year-old woman to smuggle his son over the border. Last Friday, a judge ordered the man held for violating the rights of a foreign citizen.
Images via Twitter
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Whimsical Oreo flavors, however, have an equally long and arguably much richer history. Some, like last year’s red velvet variety, end up being the real deal, while others, like the beefy remix seen above, are just the product of Photoshop.
As Snopes reported this week, the mockup originated from a video by YouTube food reviewers Wreckless Eating.
“We know the person who made it and did it ourselves,” wrote Wreckless Eating in a Facebook post on Monday. “The picture is of course fake lol.”
Image via Twitter
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In the wake of the clinch-heavy bout between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao earlier this month, one of the most widely stolen jokes online was a one-liner about how Mayweather should “hug his wife and punch Pacquiao, not the other way around.” Eventually (as all things on the internet must) the quip became a viral image, supposedly produced by Pacquiao himself.
Naturally, the photo is a simple manipulation. In the original, taken in April, Pacquiao expressed his support for Filipino rock band Siakol and The Youth, who the boxer has performed with in the past.
FORWARD
Almost immediately after this picture hit Reddit on Sunday, proud Midwesterners began pouring in to say the pictured storm was impossible and had to be the result of Photoshop. However, photographer Thomas Zimmerman maintains the image of Saturday’s tornado in Grinnell, Kansas is a photo “rendered with artistic intent” but that the twister itself was very real:
The photo is an HDR photo, if you are unfamiliar with the process you take several photos at different shutter speeds to get different brightness levels inside the scene, and then layer them with software and manual techniques so that you catch the entire dynamic range of the photo (details in the bright and dark areas of the clouds, and of the shack, etc.). It was then edited to be ominous, and moody. My intent with the photograph is to make the viewer feel what I feel when I was there in the moment, and it was a pretty freaky scene.
The one thing that I will tell everyone absolutely is it is NOT a composite photo, where the tornado scene in the sky, and the shack would have been photographed separately and then brought together in post.
Image via Twitter
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As multiple Twitter users quickly noticed, this supposed “vintage ad” for Budweiser still has the logo from the Cracked.com Photoshop contest it came from. C’mon, shitty fake photo accounts you can at least try.
