How a smiling family portrait threw Kate Middleton into royal confusion
A celebrity princess and style icon remains out of the public eye for several months. There are sporadic reports regarding his ill health and privacy. One might hope that amidst such dark news, a photo of the princess beaming with her children would be a hit with everyone – that it would put all kinds of conspiracy theories to rest.
However, when a photo was finally released by the British royal family, it had to be immediately “killed” by agencies such as Reuters and the Associated Press, which was rare by all standards. The allegation was that the photographs had been tampered with.
How did the royal family get it so wrong?
The family photo that turned into a fiasco
On the morning of March 10, Mother’s Day in the UK, news agencies around the world shared this “First official photo of Princess Catherine after surgery” in news stories., Catherine was sitting on a chair in a garden, with her three children beside her, all smiling ear to ear in the low winter sunlight.
For the royal “audience”, this picture brought comfort. Catherine was missing from the public eye since Christmas Day 2023. Kensington Palace announced on 17 January that the Princess of Wales had had “planned abdominal surgery” and would be hospitalized for approximately two weeks and would not resume her public duties. Before Easter, March 31.
speculation about Katherine’s whereabouts and well-being It was triggered by an incident on 5 March when the British Army announced that it would take part in the annual Trooping the Color event on 8 June. But it was immediately withdrawn. This worried many people, especially in light of his surgery and King Charles’s recent cancer diagnosis.
So, when a family photo of the princess and her children was released on March 10, many breathed a sigh of relief. But within hours of the photo being published, the Associated Press, Reuters, Getty Images, Agence France-Presse and others “killed” the photo and urged publishers around the world not to use it.
a royal mess
Soon after the photo was released, people ranging from experts to common people on social media began pointing out that the photo was missing a myriad of details.
This includes many of the “digital artifacts” we often see in AI-generated photos or images that have been heavily edited digitally beyond the usual minor modifications made by photographers.
Of these, the most obvious ones include a missing part of the cuff on Princess Charlotte’s sweater, the corner of her right knee appearing blurred, an out-of-focus zipper on Catherine’s coat, her right hand appearing out of focus, and a missing part of the cuff on Princess Charlotte’s sweater. A warped staircase behind Prince Louis. others also got more inconsistencies,
Kate’s apology didn’t help
After the photo was “killed” by agencies, a clarification was issued. The official I wanted to apologize for any confusion caused by the family photo we shared yesterday. I hope everyone celebrating Mother’s Day is very happy.
Despite this, the controversy refused to subside and people demanded the release of the original and unedited photo to restore trust. However, Kensington Palace refused to do so,
According to daily MailAccording to who spoke to “royal sources”, Prince William took the photo using a Canon camera on March 8, before the princess edited it twice in Photoshop.
This is also confirmed by Metadata of photos, analyzed by BBC, The photo’s metadata, obtained by the BBC, shows it was taken with a digital camera using a Canon lens. It was then saved twice to Adobe Photoshop using an Apple Mac computer.
The BBC quoted Professor Hany Farid, an expert in image analysis, as explaining what might have happened. He said, “There’s a relatively new feature where you have a group of people, the camera identifies them through facial recognition, and it takes a series of rapid photographs. And of course, when you’re in a group What happens if you take a picture of one of the people’s eyes are closed or nobody’s smiling, and so what this feature does is it looks at four, five, six, seven, ten pictures, whatever, and takes them Combines together. When it does this it sometimes makes mistakes.”
India Today examined the features of high-end Canon cameras and found that a feature called “Multiple Exposure” does indeed exist Some models like EOS 5D Mark IVWhich allows you to shoot two to nine exposures to merge into one image.
But what was the big deal in this?
While fashion and lifestyle magazines – celebrity-focused publications – often broadcast and edit photos, this is not the case with news agencies that distribute photos. Agencies like the Associated Press, Reuters, and Getty Images have strict rules about editing.