There's More Than One Way To "Photoshop" Opinion, Part II

Is that the whole of Lebanon? I thought it was bigger than Monaco.

The New York Slimes . . . distorting news and telling lies for consumption by all the champgne socialists and latte peace appeasers.

Priceless stuff.

If you look closely you can see Green Helmet guy and a couple of fake corpse/rescue workers in the rubble.

I asked for the lat & long of the photo on one of the "liberal" blogs and no one answered. I can't seem to match it to anything around the airport in Beirut on Google Earth. Anyone here able to help out?

If this really is the center of Hezbollah's power base, it should be totally leveled.

I'd say the Israelis ought to pick it up a notch. Maybe they can buy some M.O.A.B.'s from the US...

Off topic, sorry, but thought your readers would be interested in reading a comment by a guy whos signs as "Alex Cross" (who has had many excellent posts on Jihad) on Garth Turners Blog today, the text of a "Letter of “shahid”", the last paragraph...

Here’s a lesson for you. Winning a war and keeping your armour shiny are two very different tasks. You are about to learn that when you are dealing with an enemy like us, these tasks are mutually exclusive. Nothing exposes your innate weakness better than your refusal to do what needs to be done for fear of causing the hatred of Muslims. Do you think we hate you now any more or any less than we hated you on the eve of 9/11? Are you afraid of how the UN might react if you do the right thing? Doesn’t it strike you as strange that we, the obvious underdog, do not care whether you love us or hate us, although you can, in theory, blow us away in less time than it took us to film the beheading?
Think about it till we meet again. And we will, I promise.”

The link for the full letter is here, it's certainly an eye-opened (not that too many of your readers need one):

http://www.garth.ca/weblog/2006/08/08/a-trip-too-far/#comments

The Bear: The mosque in the NYT picture is at 33*51'15.10" N 35*30'21.15" E

To nitpick further - the July 21 photo must have been taken with the sun higher in the sky as the shadows are much smaller making the buildings look smaller.

the bear: here's a link to the wiki entry on this.
http://tinyurl.com/s3yfe

There's a link on the page to GoogleMap & I believe the URL contains the coordinates. Or Google may give to to you directly if play around a bit.

The time of day in the two photos is different, resulting in larger shadows in the before picture. This makes the after picture look more 2D (i.e. flattened) than the before picture.

Don makes a good point, the sun angle is totally different which will have a dramatic effect on the photos. Also, one has to make assumptions about the spectral response in order to restore the colour from a grey scale scene. I would not put very much faith in that restored photo.

IMHO if you want to compare "apples-to-apples" you need to get a satellite imagery expert to correct for the sun angle differences from the original full spectrum satellite scenes; not a colour enhanced grey scale image.

A little off topic, but not unrelated.....did anyone get the full text of the Bernard Lewis Op Ed piece in yesterdays WSJ.....I only read the snippet on Dridge....seems Aug 22nd is a potenitally dramatic day....coming from Lewis it is something to wonder about.

Stephen - Go to the WSJ site. You'll have to register, but it's not protected by subscription.

I read it and it's depressing. Lewis believes that Iran will use its nuclear bomb as soon as it can. Dead Palistineans as collateral won't be a deterrence for them because of Islam's afterlife reward as compensation.

Finding Lewis to be a reasonable and measured man, it is frightening that he concludes this. Just what is it going to take to get people to understand the whole horror and ramifications of the Death Cult we are dealing with? Obviously, a lot of numbskulls in Connecticut aren't getting it.

shaken, it's not just a different time of day, it's a different angle of perspective perhaps. Switch quickly between the two pics and you'll notice that the tops of the buildings shift south, but all the roads remain in the same position. Also, the soccer field remains in the exact same position. So the first pic must have been taken from a more northerly satellite position. (or doctored hahaha)

Please stop using the word "restored" as though you had proof the colour was deliberately removed. As I mentioned in a rather sarcastic comment in the earlier post, the B&W image is from GeoEye, and is posted in B&W on their site as well. Perhaps you would like to include GeoEye in your little conspiracy.

Photoshop "Dresden 1945" without dropping tens of 1000s of tons of bombs.

Disinformation reaches for new heights of political propaganda.

Charley,

Interesting read....

1) Typical flowery/florid arabic rhetoric
2) Typical "oriental" trash talk

Quite forgettable, best ignored. If the guy who write it is typical and thinks this is how the workd works then we have nothing to worry about, and I look forward to "meeting him again" booo scarey!!!

Totten in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Iran is on his mind.

The allusion to Dante's Inferno, aka Hell is apt?
...-

What the Israelis intend to do to prevent Iran from shipping them an even more formidable arsenal in the future still isn’t clear. Knocking Hezbollah off the border won’t do anything if they acquire more serious weapons. They already have a much greater range than the length of the intended buffer zone anyway.

I’d be lying if I said it’s scary here or that I’m nervous. It isn’t, and I’m not. But I do find my eyes wandering north every couple of minutes, not so much because I’m watching the skies but to remind myself that I’m perched on the edge of an inferno. Safe for the time being, but barely.

Mike from Canmore says Mike from CBS is full'obs.

Mike from CBS is 92 years young; has eyes like Magoo; ears like a post; can only drink Scotch from Japan Inc. What a load this is: Ahamajihad is a good guy;

Reminds one of the visit in 1937 of Liberal PM of Canada Mackenzie to Adolf Schicklegruber at the Wolf's Lair in the Bavarian Alps.

King said after: we can do business with Adolf.

It's the 1930's again deja vu. Help... Help...-

Mike Wallace Says Iranian President an 'Impressive Fellow'

Foxnews.com ^ | Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Veteran CBS journalist Mike Wallace described current Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an "impressive fellow" following their meeting Tuesday in Tehran. "You'll find him an interesting man," the 88-year-old Wallace said. "I expected more of a firebrand. I don't think he has the slightest doubt about how he feels ... about the American administration and the Zionist state. He comes across as more rational than I had expected."
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1680823/posts

Rational?? The Man wants to turn the middle east into an inferno so the Madhi can come back. Religious leaders are only bad if they are Christian??? The same lib left who pillors Dubya for his faith like this guy????

I will say it right here that we are on the edge of a real mess, and we have been lead here by people who refuse to see evil. Islam isn't evil, but it seems to have a few followers who will pervert it to their own desires....

How sweet it is.

Johnson's understatement is choice; worth framing for posterity:

“one immediate effect of the scandal is that people will be more careful when they fake photographs.”

...-

Bernhard: Reuters' Image Problem

What a pleasant surprise to find a completely fair, elegantly written article about Little Green Footballs at the LA Weekly, not normally known as a bastion of anti-idiotarianism. Thanks to Brendan Bernhard for reporting my views accurately: Reuters’ Image Problem.

And I especially enjoyed this little excerpt:

Though he has a few vocal supporters here, such as L.A.-based journalist Cathy Seipp, who calls Johnson a “righteous gentile” and points out for slow learners that being an anti-anti-Semite does not equate to racism, Johnson’s chances of being invited to a party at Arianna Huffington’s mansion are about as good as Osama bin Laden’s. (Okay, worse.)

Last February, in an article about Pajamas Media, Los Angeles magazine’s media critic, R.J. Smith, characterized Johnson’s site as “constitutionally protected hate speech.” He described LGF, which averages well over 100,000 unique hits a day, as an online hangout for “haters” who think “all Muslims are terrorists until proven innocent.” The fact that LGF provides an incredibly useful guide to global Islamist encroachment appears not to have entered his head at all.

As an example of bien pensant groupthink, Smith’s article could hardly be bettered. Smith was supposed to be a professional media “critic” writing about a hapless blogger. In reality, he was just a member of the media, as loyal to clan as a potbellied Irish cop, writing about a real media critic. Johnson caught Dan Rather trying to swing a presidential election, and now he’s blown a giant hole in the credibility of the world’s largest news service. As a result of his work, Reuters has been forced to delete all 920 Hajj photographs from its database, tighten its filing drills and institute a new policy whereby all Middle East photographs will be checked by the editor-in-charge on the Global Pictures Desk before release. Johnson achieved all this in, oh, about 48 hours. Which does lead one to ask: What have you done lately, R.J.?

In the meantime, Johnson is modest about the short-term outcome of his efforts. “In the sense that living organisms always adapt and evolve to meet challenges,” he notes wryly, “one immediate effect of the scandal is that people will be more careful when they fake photographs.”
LGF

"Also, one has to make assumptions about the spectral response in order to restore the colour from a grey scale scene. I would not put very much faith in that restored photo."

Look, if you want to get that in-depth, I'd like to know what brand of monitor you're looking at the images on, what colour space you're using, and whether your monitor has been callibrated and profiled properly.

Humph.

The point is that removing colour from an image can affect the viewer's emotional response to it. That's why I make a concious decision to go with black and white in many of my images (all my pictures start out as colour, just like GeoEye's do).

The colour was 'restored' by dropping the layer with colour over the black and white image and setting the blend mode of the top layer to 'color'. It's hardly scientific, but it does let one examine the differing emotional impact of each image, which is the point of Kate's post.