Vision Dethroned

verb: To Photoshop

Whoever said "the camera never lies" was either a prankster, a simpleton or somebody who had never heard of Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop, of course, is the world's most popular photo-editing software (for Mac and Windows). Every time a magazine pastes a movie star's head onto a different body for its cover, you can bet that Photoshop was involved. Such digital manipulation is so common that "Photoshop" has become a verb: "My ex-husband was on that trip, too, but I've Photoshopped him out of this shot."
A New Photoshop Makes Retouching Reality (Somewhat) Easier The NY Times, May 5, 2005

Visual truth is not a truth

From the material found on his hard drive, Bryan Sparks of Springfield Township, Ohio, seemed guilty when he was arrested in 2002. The sexually explicit pictures of minors appeared to put him on the wrong side of child pornography laws. But at his trial this spring, Mr. Sparks was acquitted because no one could tell for sure whether the images were authentic or just clever digital forgeries. "It used to be that you had a photograph, and that was the end of it - that was truth," said Hany Farid, an associate professor of computer science at Dartmouth College who is a leader in the field. "We're trying to bring some of that back. To put some measure of guarantee back in photography."
For Doctored Photos, a New Flavor of Digital Truth Serum The NY Times, July 22, 2004

Virtual Product Placement

Viewers of last April 25's episode of the CBS show "Yes, Dear" may have noticed a box of Club Crackers sitting on a living room coffee table, next to a plate of cheese. What they did not know was that the box did not really exist, at least not on the set. The Club Crackers box was inserted into the scene through virtual product placement, a process that uses computer graphics and digital editing to put products like potato chips, soda and shopping bags into television programs after the shows are filmed or taped.
Advertising's Twilight Zone: That Signpost Up Ahead May Be a Virtual Product The NY Times, January 2, 2006

Clever instrumentation can't create a definitive representation

THE PICTURE PROBLEM; ANNALS OF TECHNOLOGY
MALCOLM GLADWELL. 
The New Yorker. New York: Dec 13, 2004

At the beginning of the first Gulf War, the United States Air Force dispatched two squadrons of F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets to find and destroy the Scud missiles that Iraq was firing at Israel. The rockets were being launched, mostly at night, from the backs of modified flatbed tractor-trailers, moving stealthily around a four-hundred-square-mile "Scud box" in the western desert. The plan was for the fighter jets to patrol the box from sunset to sunrise. When a Scud was launched, it would light up the night sky. An F-15E pilot would fly toward the launch point, follow the roads that crisscrossed the desert, and then locate the target using a state-of-the-art, $4.6-million device called a lantirn navigation and targeting pod, capable of taking a high-resolution infrared photograph of a four-and-a-half-mile swath below the plane. How hard could it be to pick up a hulking tractor-trailer in the middle of an empty desert?

Almost immediately, reports of Scud kills began to come back from the field. The Desert Storm commanders were elated. "I remember going out to Nellis Air Force Base after the war," Barry Watts, a former Air Force colonel, says. "They did a big static display, and they had all the Air Force jets that flew in Desert Storm, and they had little placards in front of them, with a box score, explaining what this plane did and that plane did in the war. And, when you added up how many Scud launchers they claimed each got, the total was about a hundred." Air Force officials were not guessing at the number of Scud launchers hit; as far as they were concerned, they knew. They had a four-million-dollar camera, which took a nearly perfect picture, and there are few cultural reflexes more deeply ingrained than the idea that a picture has the weight of truth. "That photography not only does not, but cannot lie, is a matter of belief, an article of faith," Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner have written. "We tend to trust the camera more than our own eyes." Thus was victory declared in the Scud hunt--until hostilities ended and the Air Force appointed a team to determine the effectiveness of the air campaigns in Desert Storm. The actual number of definite Scud kills, the team said, was zero.

The problem was that the pilots were operating at night, when depth perception is impaired. lantirn could see in the dark, but the camera worked only when it was pointed in the right place, and the right place wasn't obvious. Meanwhile, the pilot had only about five minutes to find his quarry, because after launch the Iraqis would immediately hide in one of the many culverts underneath the highway between Baghdad and Jordan, and the screen the pilot was using to scan all that desert measured just six inches by six inches. "It was like driving down an interstate looking through a soda straw," Major General Mike DeCuir, who flew numerous Scud-hunt missions throughout the war, recalled. Nor was it clear what a Scud launcher looked like on that screen. "We had an intelligence photo of one on the ground. But you had to imagine what it would look like on a black-and-white screen from twenty thousand feet up and five or more miles away," DeCuir went on. "With the resolution we had at the time, you could tell something was a big truck and that it had wheels, but at that altitude it was hard to tell much more than that." The postwar analysis indicated that a number of the targets the pilots had hit were actually decoys, constructed by the Iraqis from old trucks and spare missile parts. Others were tanker trucks transporting oil on the highway to Jordan. A tanker truck, after all, is a tractor-trailer hauling a long, shiny cylindrical object, and, from twenty thousand feet up at four hundred miles an hour on a six-by-six-inch screen, a long, shiny cylindrical object can look a lot like a missile. "It's a problem we've always had," Watts, who served on the team that did the Gulf War analysis, said. "It's night out. You think you've got something on the sensor. You roll out your weapons. Bombs go off. It's really hard to tell what you did."

Looking for more information gives you more information

Now that the Discovery is in orbit, the examination begins. Its 12½-day mission will be the most photographed in the history of the shuttle program, with all eyes on the craft to see if it suffered the kind of damage from blastoff debris that brought down the Columbia in February 2003. But all this inspection may be a mixed blessing. The more NASA looks for damage, engineers and other experts say, the more it will find. "How do you distinguish - discriminate - between damage which is critical and damage which is inconsequential?" asked Dr. David Wolf, an astronaut who spent four months aboard the Russian space station Mir. "We could be faced with very difficult decisions, in part because of all this additional information that we will be presented with." "NASA faces a similar challenge, he said: "I'm sure they want to do the best they can. But the harder they look, they'll find more things."
Intense Hunt for Signs of Damage Could Raise Problems of Its Own. The NY Times, July 27, 2005

Looking Closely At Your Heart

What if doctors had a new way to diagnose heart disease that took only seconds and provided pictures so clear it showed every clogged artery, so detailed that it was like holding a living heart in your hand? There is hardly wide agreement over whether this new technique, known as multidetector CT scans of the heart, is entirely a good thing. Indeed, critics say, the technology is ripe for overuse, with doctors scanning people who do not need to be scanned and finding - and fixing - medical problems that do not need to be fixed. Dr. Garcia said, "this CT machine in an emergency room could take a picture and very quickly tell" whether the pain is from a blocked artery, or not. He added: "That's a phenomenal potential. I am convinced it will change the practice of medicine." "To me, it's a nightmare waiting to happen," said Dr. Nissen, who is calling for strict guidelines overseeing use of the new machines. "I am concerned that it is going to be difficult to control and it could bust the health care system in terms of cost."
Heart Scanner Stirs New Hope and a Debate The NY Times, November 17, 2004

Too Many Digital Photos

At a time when this country is indulging in an unparalleled binge of personal picture taking, and some digital photographers find themselves drowning in the product of their enthusiasm, the notion is dawning that even in a digital realm less may still be more. "When you have hundreds of pictures where you used to have one, people are less likely to ever go back to look at any of them," said Nancy Van House, a professor. "A lot of people are getting to the point in their digital photography now where it's becoming a problem." AMERICA'S amateur photographers produced 28 billion digital pictures last year, 6 billion more than they shot on film, even though only half as many own a digital camera, according to the market research firm InfoTrends. That does not count pictures deleted before being printed or transferred for storage. People are not just switching formats. They are taking more pictures, 13 billion more last year on film and digital combined than in 2000, when the price of digital cameras began to decline.
Stop Them Before They Shoot Again The NY Times, May 5, 2005