ROMNMNEY 2012

Zeke Miller at Buzzfeed made a great find.

It seems that Team Romney – actually Mitt Romney himself – sent out a photo on Instagram touting one of his “big” rallies. The only problem is that the photo is clearly a really bad photoshop (or, as Zeke generously suggest, perhaps a really really awfully done panorama).

You can go over to Buzzflash and see all the spots where the photo is obviously faked, but my favorite is this below. I took the photo, reversed it so you can see the Romney banner, then blew it up to make it more easily readable – and what does it read?

“ROMNMNEY 2012”.

Now, for the entire photo that Romney sent out. First, here’s the “real” photo that I reverse-engineered by getting rid of the obvious photoshoppping, followed by the “original” that Romney sent out. I have them both left justified so you can see the difference.

A wee bit of a difference.

I do a lot of panoramic photography, and have for years. I use some decently expensive software, but have also used Photoshop, and cheaper stuff. I’ve never seen any automatic panoramic software do this bad a job. There’s no way the software wouldn’t recognize, for example, the obvious support beam and cement base – it duplicated it, rather than merged them. Highly unlikely that this was a software accident.

Oh, and one more thing: Those are rocks, or something similar, at the bottom of the photo and to the right. How convenient that they look like additional heads in the crowd.