Enlarge image
Likes to experiment with image editing: Princess Kate
Photo: i Images / IMAGO
There was great excitement: The Royals published a photo of Princess Kate with her children on Instagram and X, formerly Twitter.
Royal fans applauded the beautiful shot, Kate's first since undergoing abdominal surgery in January.
Others commented more critically on the photo.
“This photo looks edited,” reads one of the rather friendly comments on Instagram.
The press agencies then noticed that something wasn't right, which first distributed the photo, then put a so-called "kill notice" on it and withdrew it.
A closer look would reveal several discrepancies, explained the AP news agency.
The photo was “manipulated in a way that does not meet AP photography standards.”
What happened there?
A piece of the sleeve is missing
As it now turns out, the princess herself had tampered with the pictures.
She explained on X on Monday afternoon that she “sometimes experiments with image editing.”
At the same time, she apologized “for any confusion” that the photo she had edited had caused.
The most noticeable flaw appears near her daughter Charlotte's left hand.
If you enlarge the picture a little, you'll see that a piece of the sleeve seems to be missing.
Instead, the pattern of the princess's skirt can be seen, through which a little of the material from her cardigan peeks through near the wrist.
Such errors can have various causes.
One possible explanation: Kate tried to digitally cover parts of the image with a so-called mask to exclude them from other image processing steps, but she worked sloppily and didn't draw the boundaries clearly enough.
Another attempt at an explanation: She could have tried to correct an image error using the digital stamp function of her photo software.
An error-free image area is copied to another location in the image.
In this case, however, very careless if the assumption is correct.
The Pixel 8 thesis
On
To use this, you take several photos of the same group of people within ten seconds.
You can then click together the best snapshots of each person's face into one image.
This way you get a group photo in which everyone is smiling, no one has their eyes closed or looks strange.
more on the subject
Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro in the test: This is what Google's new AI smartphones can doBy Matthias Kremp
A nice theory, which unfortunately suffers from the fact that Google's algorithms, as described, only focus on faces.
This would explain why everyone is so happy about the photo in question, but not the other errors that can be found there.
Suddenly out of focus
This includes the fact that Kate's right hand, with which she is hugging her son Louis, is completely out of focus, while her left hand is in focus, which is about the same distance from the camera.
It is hardly possible to speculate what went wrong here.
It looks as if Kate had applied soft focus with a thick digital brush.
The fact that some viewers are bothered by the fact that there is no wedding ring on their fingers probably has less to do with image manipulation.
Maybe she just takes it off sometimes.
The strange posture of Prince Louis' right hand doesn't have to be attributed to the Photoshop adept either.
It certainly looks strange in the picture that his index finger is not visible and his middle finger is wrapped around his ring finger.
But maybe the young prince just has a thing for this way of draping his fingers.
Children do things like that.
Soft wool, sharp edges
Even the strangely overlapping pattern on the right shoulder of his sweater could simply be due to moderately high-quality wool processing rather than clumsy image manipulation of the princess.
Yes, because the question arises: What would the hobby photo editor want to improve at this point?
The same question also arises with the strangely sharp-edged bright step that can be seen in the background.
Why would you want to change anything about such image elements?
And yet this image error only contributes to classifying the entire work as somehow incorrect.
Ultimately, Princess Kate should probably consider taking a look at the manual for her photo software, buying a book or watching a few online tutorials before her next foray into the wonderful world of image editing.
Then next time the family photo will work too.