Between lies

I promessed to return into Mr. North' s "analysis" but pictures keeps me going and going...

This is a copy taken from a chinese site related to Xinhua News Agency. It is slightly better than other copies analysed before:


The picture is clearly better. The shadows of the glasses can be well seen near the eyes and it is less trashed by JPEG. I made several enhancments of the other pictures I had and they could not give the same detail as this one. Still it shows many of the things seen on other pictures, the sharp pixelisation of details contrasting with the smoothness of other, the baby's hand behind the pants, the false colors of the skin and clothes... Besides it seems to lack focus as the others.

But it is not such a big trouble to try to "return" the focus to the picture. There are tools that restore it with a relative fidelity. Well I used two of these tools to get a more focused picture. The first tool was GreyCstoration. This tool tries to remove the noise while keeping the main features of the picture. It is much better than simple Gaussian blur becuase the second tool tends to restore all the noise seen at the picture. Now the second tool was Refocus-It . An excellent tool, with some limitations, that allows one to try to restore the focus of a blurred picture. And what I got? This:



The result shows a "rubber" texture over everything, the result of too much effort to use GreyCstoration. However we get things that were hard to see on the previous picture. As I remarked before, over Red Channel, Green Helmet seems stressed, the look more lost. Here, the processing of two tools over the whole picture shows a very similar protrait. But be aware! This is not a reproduction of the original picture! It is an enhancement showing details that seem to have been blurred or defocused. It just shows that the "original" news picture may be quite far from the true original. This enhancement does not free us from deliberate and accurate retouches, which seem to have been done at several places. It only remark us details that may have suffered slight retouches.

Anyway it shows a lie, more a pack of lies. Lies going from "Decisive Green Helmet in face of the aggression" up to "photos were staged and people posed". Between freelancer strategist Adnan Hajj and wheelchair strategist Richard North. And between these guys, the media: Internet, the papers, the TV, journalists and agencies . And in the very centre of the Lie: the auditory. Those who keep swallowing news, lying to themselves that the media informs them. People who don't give themselves any benefit of doubt to what goes around the news. These are the Homo Simpsoniens of this world. Which is nearly becoming the whole Mankind...