To begin with, I need to apologize...the other day, in this post, I talked about "a mimicking error" as if it were a common term. Obviously, that should have been error mimicking...and neither one is a common term after all, although I could swear I read about it somewhere. The idea is that something that is not an error seems like an error (i.e., mimics it), creating ambiguity; and, more specifically, now that we have Photoshop, there are cases arising in which things look just like they've been put together in Photoshop when in fact they haven't been.
Case in point is this recent Getty Images shot by Stuart Franklin (not the Magnum photographer) which was published on page 15 of the June 12th, 2008 Express, a free ancillary publication of the Washington Post (wrongly credited to the AP in the byline). Here's the whole item:
The picture looks so much like a bad Photoshop kludge that it was featured on the popular website "Photoshop Disasters." However, it's not a botched Photoshop collage at all—it's a perfectly straight photograph, if perhaps ill chosen and awkwardly cropped. Take a look at the whole frame (from the Getty Images website):
Including the men's feet makes their relative positions more clear. Here's another frame near the one above from the Getty Images catalog:
In the original Express presentation it amounts to a fascinating optical illusion. First of all there's the accident that Phil Mickelson (the golfer on the left) appears to be looking up at the head of Tiger Woods' club. But the real illusion is that the hard in-focus edge of the right side of Tiger's torso (viewer's left) appears to be the top edge of the shirt sleeve on Mickelson's upper left arm (viewer's right). This makes it look like Mickelson's arm is in front of Tiger's body, a clear impossibility. In the original image, put your finger over the offending edge and see if the picture doesn't resolve itself more sensibly.
You might call this "edge swapping," where the edge of one thing looks like the edge of another. It reminds me of the problem of "tonal mergers" in black-and-white photography. For anyone not aware of that phenomenon, a tonal merger is when two objects or areas in a scene have the same tone of gray (even if they're different colors in real life) such that the form of one or the other is difficult to discern in the B&W picture.
The picture was hotly debated on the Photoshop Disasters site, with some readers insisting that it had to be (that is, it is "obviously") a Photoshop job. They're wrong, if understandably so. For us, it's good to be reminded from time to time that photographs are not always easy to read (despite the fact that most pictures we see are chosen in part because they are easy to read). As photographers, we now need to be on the lookout for aspects of our pictures that might look as if they were done in Photoshop when they actually weren't. Like other forms of error mimicking (a term I appear to have coined—sorry again!), "apparent Photoshop" is in essence a type of ambiguity—one of many—and photographers and editors alike need to be aware that it can happen.
Mike (Thanks to Chris Combs, a picture editor at the Express)