Did the Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton, recently pose with a good face and a wide smile with her three children, also smiling, for her husband’s camera? For a few hours we thought so: this was evidenced by the photo published on the official account of the marriage on Instagram last Sunday. But now we no longer know what is true about that photograph and what is false. The Princess of Wales admitted that she had “edited” the image as “many amateur photographers” do, but the numerous signs of manipulation detected are compatible with techniques to add or remove elements (faces?) from photographs.
With the dissemination of a manipulated image, Kate Middleton not only deceived her millions of followers, but dragged us the media around the world, including La Vanguardia, which published the photograph in the digital edition on Sunday and in print on Monday. The correction and alert to readers came when the major international photo agencies indicated that they were withdrawing the image after analyzing it in detail.
Xavier Cervera, chief photography editor of La Vanguardia and associate professor at the UAB, has also analyzed the photograph and believes that it is most likely that parts of different snapshots were combined. Cervera emphasizes that the digital editing or post-production of photographs is a common and necessary process, equivalent to the old analogue development and which must be used to adjust the light, saturation or contrast of the photograph. In the journalistic field, this process has “clear red lines and a very basic one is that nothing can be added or taken away”.
It is essential, Cervera underlines, that “the readers of La Vanguardia know that when they look at a photo in this newspaper, everything they see is real”. To ensure that remains the case in these times when AI makes it possible for anyone to modify or create images out of thin air that look absolutely real, he adds, it will be necessary to further increase checks on photographs that have not taken by the same La Vanguardia photographers or that do not have the endorsement of the big agencies that are governed by strict journalistic criteria.
And this precaution, as demonstrated by the case of Kate Middleton, will have to be applied even when the image comes from apparently reliable sources.
