Here's another article that shows where the image gets suspicious:
https://www.express.co.uk/news/royal/1875909/princess-kate-m...
I’m not much of a royal watcher but I do find this story fascinating. I suspect the reality is going to end up being boring: people at the palace (or William himself given he apparently took the photo) are a combination of arrogant and insecure enough that they took a perfectly good but not quite perfect photo and felt like they had to edit it until it looked exactly like they decided it should. But we’ll see.
It is very normal for professional photographers to pose subjects separately or use head shots on the body of a different photo. In this case, the lighting on all of their faces is too consistent and similar, and indicates their faces were photographed separately and then composited. You would be surprised by the number of movie star promo photos you see where they have put the actor’s head on a different subjects body
This seems to a bit more informative as to the issues:
https://twitter.com/chrisshipitv/status/1766947758529822803/...
This thread has been flag bombed and it currently on the last page of HN, item #636
Am I the only one to think of the text editor when I see Kate without much context in a title ?
There was a story a few weeks ago about some odd picture taken, and it turned out to be motion blur compensation / HDR / some other computational method creating artifacts. That’s my first instinct looking at this pic, but who knows!
Princess of Wales: Kate apologises for Mother's Day photo 'confusion'
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68534359
The Princess of Wales has apologised "for any confusion" her Mother's Day photograph caused, after five agencies retracted it over editing concerns.
Catherine, in a statement posted on Kensington Palace social media, said: "Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing."
The image, taken by the Prince of Wales, was the first of Catherine to be released since her surgery in January.This isn't a simple composition; entire details were ai created. You can see sections around her hair that look like stable diffusion inpainting. The texture will immediately be cut off and a very softer blurred ai generated part will continue. There are details all around the image that look like that. The jacket and both sweaters aren't original for instance. Large sections of the background on the left were clearly added in as well.
Virtually the only original parts of the image that are unmodified are the faces and hair from the neck up and fingers on the two older children. The person who made this clearly had nothing to go on.
The intersection of Kate's head and her son's chin looks suspect to me, and there is no wedding ring to be seen. All very strange.
There’s stuff doing the rounds on twitter from a investigative journalist that’s pretty dark. This image stuff is adding fuel to that fire.
Putting aside the terrible Photoshop job, I found it interesting that the two youngest kids have both crossed their middle fingers as some sort of gesture. Surprised that I didn't see any mention of that in the articles.
If she's taking longer to recover from surgery than expected, why don't they just be honest and say that?
It seems someone removed objects from the kids hands? Maybe a branded thing or something personal. Maybe an animal.
I get the feeling that the editing was done by an IA editing tool of some kind.
Here's what Google has to say about the one in their pixel 8.
"If you’re trying to take a group photo, even if you take multiple shots, chances are someone is always looking away or blinking — we’ve all been there, especially if you’ve ever tried to take a photo with kids. To take the stress out of getting that perfect group shot, the new Best Take feature in Google Photos uses a series of similar photos taken close together to help you automatically create a blended image with everyone’s best expression."