again I’m gonna disagree with you. His pants are the straightest, sure, but other officers (?) in that pic have reasonably straight pants, straight enough that their shadows wouldn’t be at such a severely different angle than the one cast by KJI’s pants. The guys three to the left and three to the right of KJI both have pretty straight pants, and both cast shadows at quite different angles than KJI
Yes, beyond any reasonable doubt.
But is he sick sick, hospitalized sick, or six-months-in-the-ground-with-no-clear-successor sick?
What was the point of the doctoring of the photo in the OP? Like, how is it different than the original–I’m not really getting it.
Maybe pertinent to this particular discussion, the North Korean government is alleged to produce the best counterfeit US currency in the world. If indeed “best” is the appropriate term–feels a little weird to say it.
To produce a new picture showing the Great Leader in a vertical position. Take a pic of soldiers and an old pic of KJI, merge them together. If he’s really sick, he may not be able to stand for a picture or perhaps he could but the soldiers (esp. the officers) would clearly notice his frailness. The big power struggle in NK for some time now has been between KJI and the military. Don’t want to show any signs of weakness.
Is there anything in the entire photo that indicates the date? I mean, why photoshop at all? Why not just toss an old photo out there? They haven’t proven anything to anyone if there’s not a date/time indictor in the photo. Dude…hold up a newspaper or something!
Another vote for not Photoshopped. If it was 'shopped, the soldier’s shadow to his left would have also been manipulated as the dark line doesn’t run through it.
The problem isn’t the line of the shadow but the width of it. The man on the right with the straight pants is casting a much wider shadow than Kim.
I wish we had larger versions of the two full pictures – I want to see if the image of Kim is the same in both of them. It’s possible that they’ve been splicing a stock image of him into group shots for some time.
You know, you guys are right. I don’t think Kim Il Jong was ever on the moon at all.
In this one it looks as if it’s the BBC making this up. The close up is supposed to be a zoom of the larger one, but KJI’s shadow is different between the two.
By claiming the closeup is an undoctored zoom of the group photo, which it is clearly not as evidenced by his changing shadow, the reporter must now prove to me that HE is not the one who doctored the zoom to fit his story.
Is there another picture of KJI in the same pose, same shadow (either one) in a different group or setting?
Please read the whole thread. We have already dealt with this. The photo on that blog page is not the correct one. I linked to the BBC’s page showing the correct full photo.
The shadow of Jong’s head on the soldier behind him appears to be correct, when compared to the others. Perhaps what they’ve done is not photoshop Jong in, but photoshopped something out, like heavy leg braces. That would explain why Jong’s pants legs, and the area surrounding them look so funny. They had to take out all signs of leg braces. If Jong’s had a stroke, he might need leg braces to stand upright, like FDR did after being stricken by polio.
Or they photoshopped out the audioanimatronic puppet cables.
I was thinking something like this, too. But if he had leg braces, wouldn’t he also have some serious crutches? I’m in no way a photo expert, but it doesn’t look like anything was deleted from his hands/arms.
I don’t know, I’d suspect that it’d have something to do with his ability to balance himself. Of course, we can’t see one of his hands in the photo. Perhaps it had a cane to steady him?
I think the photoshopped-out theory may be right. What may have been taken out are one or two crutches that Kim needed to stand properly. The odd bits of the photo are all where a crutch would be.
You all totally don’t get it. First of all, Kim Jong Il invented Photoshop. Secondly, he likes to give point instruction to the DPRK media on how to achieve total self-sufficiency in image manipulation, which was covered under his undergraduate thesis, “The Juche Ideology for Continuing Mass Revolution in the Mass Media.” (Incidentally, the thesis was so good that his adviser cried himself to death after seeing the perfection that he would never attain in writing academic papers, and which the Dear Leader mastered in his first try.)
Thirdly, when the Dear Leader Photoshops something, it is perfect. There is no line. There are no shadows. There are four lights.
Finally, Kim Jong Il probably worked on that photo for literally three seconds, because he had a 2:30 tee time. I hear he ended up shooting 38 under.
I’m with some of the other posters here: this doesn’t look fake to me, or at least the graphic artist did a damn good job.
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The “mismatched pixels” are a JPEG artifact. Look at all the people standing there, and they all have pixel shimmer by thier legs.
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I’m not convinced at all by the shadow argument – Kim could just be standing closer to the wall than those near him.
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The line thing… yeah, I don’t see a handy explanation for that one, given its presence in the “large” version behind all the other soldiers in the line except Kim. I’ll stipulate that one, but its still not very convincing evidence to me.
If you look at the right of the foot, that’s the exact same look you get when you poorly use the Clone Stamp tool in Photoshop. I should know, as I my use of it is exclusively of poor quality. The other feet in there have a halo around the foot. On Kim Jong-Il, the halo cuts into the right side of the shoe. It also has that “fade in” quality that you get with the Clone Stamp instead of a distinct line. This could be an artifact of compression, though.
My thought is that the people who are saying that something was photoshopped out are probably correct.
Wow, Kim sure gets around.
