ROYAL FAMILY
Kate Middleton photo editing: how was controversial Princess of Wales portrait changed?
The Princess of Wales apologised on Monday, after Kensington Palace released a manipulated Mother’s Day that was later pulled by news agencies.
It is not known exactly how the controversial photograph of Kate Middleton was edited before its release at the weekend, but experts say the snap may have been manipulated by combining multiple images to generate a composite.
Kate has apologised for the Mother’s Day image, which was the first official photograph of the Princess of Wales since she underwent abdominal surgery in January. In the weeks since her operation, her failure to reappear in public life had prompted rumours about her health - and this speculation has only been fuelled by Kensington Palace’s publication of an altered photo.
What did Princess of Wales say in her apology?
In a statement on Monday, Kate said she was responsible for the manipulation of the photo. “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” she said. “I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.” The princess, wife of heir-to-the-throne Prince William, did not say how she had altered the image, in which she is seen sitting in a chair, surrounded by the couple’s three children.
A palace insider has told The Telegraph that Kate feels “awful” about the edited photo, which she had wanted to make “the best it could be”.
Following the photograph’s release on Sunday, it was pulled from circulation by a number of leading news agencies - including AP, AFP, Getty and Reuters - after it became apparent that the image had been manipulated.
What signs of editing were there in Kate’s Mother’s Day photo?
A major flaw flagged by agencies is the alignment of Princess Charlotte’s sleeve cuff with her left hand. A portion of her cuff appears to be missing. Other inconsistencies in the photo include unnatural green blurring around Charlotte’s right knee, and a seemingly misaligned zip on Kate’s jacket. Next to Prince Louis’ right leg, meanwhile, the base of a wooden door appears unexpectedly jagged.
How might photo have been edited?
Sky News has reported that the photo, which was taken by the Prince of Wales, reportedly on a Canon camera worth around $4,000, was saved twice in the photo-editing software Adobe Photoshop on Friday. Speaking to the BBC, the image-analysis expert Professor Hany Farid said the possible ways in which the snap was amended include manual touch-ups, the use of automatic tools offering functions such as blur removal, and the creation of a composite image.
Composite photos are a useful - but fallible - way of creating a group snap, Farid said: “Invariably what happens when you take a photo of a group of people is somebody has their eyes closed or someone’s not smiling, and so what this feature does is it looks at four, five, six, seven, ten photos, whatever, and composites them together. When it does that it sometimes makes mistakes.”
Amid speculation that the Mother’s Day photograph was generated by artificial intelligence, Farid told the BBC that this doesn’t appear to be the case. In an interview with CNN, fellow imaging expert Professor Ramesh Raskar agreed that the photo was unlikely to be a product of AI - and seemed to lean towards the theory that it is a composite image. “It’s unlikely that it was ever one single image,” Raskar said. “A photo editing app probably introduced these errors.”
What did agencies say about Kate photo?
Explaining its decision to issue what is known as a ‘photo kill’ on Sunday, Reuters said: “Leading picture agencies distributing news photographs prohibit the publication of images that have been overly edited.”
AP added: “AP’s news values and principles explain that minor photo editing, including cropping and toning and color adjustments, are acceptable when necessary for clear and accurate reproduction and should maintain the authentic nature of the photograph.
“Changes in density, contrast, color and saturation levels that substantially alter the original scene are not acceptable. Backgrounds should not be digitally blurred or eliminated by burning down or by aggressive toning. The removal of ‘red eye’ from photographs is not permissible.”