Photoshopping Military Might

Charges against Iran’s Sepah News for digitally altering a photo of the country’s missile tests on Wednesday arose Friday after analysts discovered what is clearly a Photoshopped extra missile in an image released by the media arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. The image, which was used by the L.A. Times and the Chicago Tribune on their front pages, was later retracted.

The New York Times:

As news spread across the world of Iran’s provocative missile tests, so did an image of four missiles heading skyward in unison. Unfortunately, it appeared to contain one too many missiles, a point that had not emerged before the photo was used on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites.

Agence France-Presse said that it obtained the image from the Web site of Sepah News, the media arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, on Wednesday. But there was no sign of it there later in the day. Today, The Associated Press distributed what appeared to be a nearly identical photo from the same source, but without the fourth missile.

As the ... illustration shows, the second missile from the right appears to be the sum of two other missiles in the image. The contours of the billowing smoke match perfectly near the ground, as well in the immediate wake of the missile. Only a small black dot in the reddish area of exhaust seems to differ from the missile to its left, though there are also some slight variations in the color of the smoke and the sky.

Read more

nytimes.com

The digitally altered missile, second from the right, was created from an amalgam of two of the other missiles.