Readers may recall that we caught NOAA NCDC red handed putting in a photoshopped flooded house a couple of years back for an official government report.
Image above taken directly from the CCSP report. Read more here
Then there’s the famous polar bear on the ice floe image ursus bogus.
And let’s not forget Al Gore’s hurricanes for his book cover:
So when Tom Nelson asked today “Who’s got time to investigate BlackSmokeGate?” I decided to take on the task. Here’s the photo in question:
Tom was rightfully concerned that white steam rather than smoke comes out of these plants, as shown in this photo.
This station has been identified in the comment section of the article using it as Eggborough power station. Check out the white cloud coming from the power station in this Wikipedia photo.
I decided to run a simple but well known tool to detect if Photoshop had been used. Bingo!
Output from http://www.pskiller.com/
Basically all that was done was to highlight a part of the steam with the point to point select tool, feather it and adjust the contrast to make it look darker.
[UPDATE: I found a different version of the image on the web at Sky News here and ran it through PSKiller’s detector. It’s even more damning:
PS Quantization tables are a dead giveaway. ]
I’ll bet somebody could find this image original in some stock photo library. It is from John Giles PA Wire. It gets a lot of play according to Nelson. For example here it is used in conjunction with Climategate2:
Nelson asks:
If you have time to compile a list of the mainstream media uses of this photo, please let me know. If you’ve taken some action to protest this propaganda (maybe a letter to an editor?) please also let me know.
By the way, has this photo been altered in any way? [YES – Anthony]
Update: A TinEye search for the top image yields 92 results.
A TinEye search for the bottom image yields 94 results.
To illustrate how easy this is to make black smoke from steam, I located an image of a smoke stack online of the Zimmer Power Plant Smoke Stack in Moscow, Ohio, here
Then I applied the simple technique I described.
- highlight a part of the steam with the point to point select tool
- feather it
- adjust the brightness and contrast to make it look darker.
Granted it was a rush job and I didn’t go all the way to the right in the plume, but this took all of 45 seconds:
See how easy that is to make black smoke where there was only steam before?
UPDATE2: Here’s another example of Photoshop at work. The greens must really hate this power station in Britain. “Black” smoke from cooling towers? Really? Everyone knows they produce water vapor, and even the sun angle doesn’t look right in this one from the Guardian.
It doesn’t survive the test either:
And yet if you do an image search for this power station, you’ll find nothing like this image anywhere else except on the Guardian Website.
UPDATE: Autonomous Mind looks into the photo above, conversing with the photographer is interesting more for what he doesn’t say. Well worth a read here:
Has the Guardian published fauxtography?
– Anthony
I find this particularly worrisome. When the next Pope is elected (signalled by a puff of white smoke from the Sistine chapel smoke stack) the worlds media will not be capable of discerning it through their global warming glasses.
It could be a long election process as black smoke signals – no result.
Scorle says:
November 25, 2011 at 12:06 pm
“Dire Wolf, it is not the “warmists” who use such photos for articles, but it is the media: they want to show plumes if the subject is emission.”
Most of the media are warmists.
” by the way, only white plumes from cooling towers are not accompanied with CO2, al other plumes are. So in fact it is not really wrong to couple CO2 tot plumes.”
So it is not really wrong to photoshop the material you want to use in reports? You must be a fan of Hisbollah and Reuters.
Dirk H. I am fan of posting relevant information on scientific climate issues on a site that is claiming willing to do so. However discussions about if a condensing cloud looks dark at the shadow site or not is interesting from physics and photographers point of view, but it has nothing to do with global warming issues.
The the story about the white cloud turning black after evaporation of the droplets.
The white cloud I saw was formed outside the chimneys: to capture the droplets they should have
made sufficient supersaturation (cooling) before the chimney and more precisely before the droplet capturing devices. May be they did, probably they did even, but even then you have a lot of interstitual aerosol, sized 100 to 500 nanometer, not acting as cloud condensation nuclei and again supersaturation behind the chimney as long as you end up above ambient temperature. Since it was a bit freezing on that day it would have been a hell of a job to get the dew point from about 30 to 40 degrees to below zero to avoid supersaturation in ambient air.
So you see it was a normal plume from a burning process at a company 9in West-Germany) and although I do not know what kind of company, I assume they are restricted by legislations concerning the emissions.
It is not strange to see such amount of black aerosol if there was for instance a coal fired process of a steel company.
It is just that they cannot capture all the aerosol. However, my point was: even when a white plume seems to be clean with shiny bright waterdroplets, it can hide a lot of nasty blackish stuff (in the droplets and between the droplets) that becomes often only visible after loosing the camouflage of the light effecting droplets.
I should add that my previous post was referring to stack emissions.
The visible plume rising from cooling towers is water vapour. However worth repeating that nobody is wilfully being wasteful, the rejected heat comes from basic thermodynamics.
It is being wasteful to operate old power stations – new coal fired plant would be somewhat more efficient (although “somewhat” equates to a lot of fuel), but would be blocked by planning and permitting.
Everyone knows it is evil black “carbon” that is causing the earth to burn and what it should look like. It is just inconvenient that it does not show up where it is needed to be. Referring properly to CO2 “would just dilute the message” of course.
why don’t we reverse engineer it back to it’s pre photoshop image? Searching for it’s twin would be easier.
Now how to do that? Don’t know. But I think Crosspatch is on to something with his guess that the clouds are back lit by the sun. Perhaps this photo is a combination of careful camera placement and photoshop enhancing.
The angle of the sun in the sky would be about 15 – 20 degrees above the horizon. That means the background blue sky is shaded too dark.
There is no evidence of “Photoshopping” as you call it. When you constantly cry wolf, especially in areas you don’t understand, you are going to destroy your own credibility.
According to the AP guidelines (http://www.ap.org/newsvalues/index.html) you can use Photoshop for minor adjustments, like cropping and resizing the image. This will result in PhotoShop tags and quantization tables being used. PhotoShop automatically does some minor contrast and sharpening adjustments. It’s not a ‘smoking gun’ that the image has been intentionally distorted.
The distortion in this image comes from taking the picture with the sun behind the towers, causing the exhaust plume to have deep shadows. Except for a full image contrast adjustment, there is no need for the type of techniques described by Anthony. (I suspect a full image contrast adjustment may have been done to emphasize the difference between light and dark, making the dark blacker).
I found a similar image (http://c1.dmlimg.com/2e5c93fc5fcb277c88837e18ff8cc0451564da1a7be45eb19bb62eec311306eb.jpg) and ran it through te PSKiller website, and it found nothing except for missing EXIF info.
If Anthony had any real evidence, rather than insinuation, this would be a major scandal, the photographer John Giles would be fired, and the AP would remove his images from the collection (eg.http://www.apimages.com/OneUp.aspx?st=k&kw=john%20giles&showact=results&sort=date&intv=None&cfas=PHOTOGRAPHER_NAME&sh=100025&kwstyle=or&dbm=PThirtyDay&adte=1322248416&pagez=60&cfasstyle=AND&PHOTOGRAPHER_NAME=%22John%20Giles%22&rids=09ad42b86591474fbba46e862649ab6f&page=1&xslt=1&mediatype=Photo)
If you want to learn about finding real evidence of image manipulation, you should check out Neal Krawetz’s blog http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/.
Hmm… Just an idea, don’t know if it would work but if you wanted to remove those particular traces of photoshopping, why not do your photoshopping, then take a picture of the photoshopped picture and then present that as the original?
I disagree with the identification of the station. The Wikipedia photo of the Eggborough station shows one flue at the top of the chimney. The photo associated with BlackSmokeGate has two flues. This difference is my disagreement.
Scorle says:
To find in such a minor contrastfull made photo a proof for window dressing or whatsoever is just very childish, please keep yourself to more appropriate comments on climate news.
Except that the entire global warming enterprise is an endless parade of window dressing, and that is exactly what this picture is used for, 94 times and counting.
I am a press photographer and made comments under this post of Tom’s on him blog this morning. I invite you all to go and read them. The photographer works for Associated Press (Press Association in the UK). If anyone so suspects that the image was altered beyond what he took, feel free to ring him up and discuss, or email. As a fellow press photographer, I would surmise there is no ‘enhancement’ in this photo, perhaps some contrast added. In our profession, it is a firing offense to meddle with nature. It is what it is. Billowing steam, possibly on a cool morning, backlit by sun, just as clouds are perpetually backlit. Clouds that are ‘thick’ darken, sometimes to near black, clouds that are ‘thin’ tend to white. The poster above who suggested the dark side is the shadow of the thick steam has it correct. This photo was taken for greatest visual impact, for better or for worse. The “problem” with it is that most innocent viewers will assume it is filth they are seeing instead of a cloud.
I note an oil slick emerging from behind the pinkish house?
Here is another image by John Giles of the same stack, that you can analyze with TinEye and PSKiller: http://www.dw-world.de/image/0,,2306742_4,00.jpg
crosspatch says:
November 25, 2011 at 10:21 am
One can also position themselves so that the plume is directly between the photographer and the sun. This will, if the plume is dense enough, make the plume appear dark just as a cloud can appear dark if the sun is behind it but white if viewed from a different angle.
——————————————————————————————–
An honorable person would not use a darkened photograph of “steam” in a photo on pollution.
Reply to Marchesrosa:
Power plants generate a LOT of water vapor. But by the time it gets to the top of the stack it has been run thru a number of heat extraction devices to suck every bit of recoverable eanergy from the hot gasses. However you have to leave the gasses hot enough to carry up to the top of the stack and away into the air. So you cannot remove all the heat.
The issue is not the content of the photo, but what the photo is said to represent. Don’t forget, there was never any enhancement or alteration of the beautiful photos of polar bears said by crooks to be ‘stranded’. That photo was taken innocently enough but was subsequently used for nefarious purposes. Such is the case with this steam photo. I live in a steel producing factory town. We received complaints over the years for using dramatic looking photos of steam from our stacks as if … well, just as this photo is being used and arguably abused.
This looks strangely similar but different:
http://www.accountancyage.com/IMG/698/128698/power-station-eggborough-370×229.jpg?1289203291
And finally… 🙂 We press photographers use photoshop for every single photo we take. Like some people use Word for every single word they write. The verb ‘to photoshop’ has connotations beyond, and is subject to misuse. If the photographer enhanced this photo beyond what he and the camera fairly saw, he and the AP should be taken to task. Like I’ve said, we don’t take kindly to undeclared manipulation, as in Al Gore’s hurricane set up above.
Lol – I live in Fort McMurray – the most photo-shopped stacks on the planet. In by far the most photo-shopped tailings ponds, landscape – or moonscape if using the photo-shopped version – since this planet was formed 4+ billion years ago. You guys are ALL small time amateurs – we destroy entire planets. We are the only true professionals on a planet destroying level these little pipes shown here wouldn’t even qualify as a home furnace chimney in my neighborhood. Sorry if this appears rude – but my response is indeed correct.
The last photo with the “black” steam rising from the cooling towers has also been cropped. The tall stack is emitting a plume that is casting a shadow over the cooling towers and making the steam from the cooling towers look blacker than it should. The full photo is very small, but can be seen at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainability/commercial
This is not to say that other tricks have not been played with the pictutre: heightening contrast, etc.
“THIS LOOKS SHOPPED / I CAN TELL FROM SOME OF THE PIXELS AND FROM SEEING QUITE A FEW SHOPS IN MY TIME.”
The UK has a code of practise that all news editors are supposed to adhere to. Lets see what the first clause is
Oops.
Found a similar photo. Looks like the same power plant. Steam cloud is slightly different, but has been photoshopped in a similar way. Actually, it almost looks like they did a better job on this one, as the one you have posted above has definite artifacts of contrast change (with apologies to robertdavidgraham, but my husband was able to see the artifacts after just a few seconds of looking at the picture).
http://www.thejournal.ie/the-week-in-photos-56-281160-Nov2011/#slide-slideshow9
The Giles picture could well appear dark because it is backlit. More interesting is the Eggborough photo by Murdo Macleod.
It is clear from the shadows that the sun is positioned to the left of the towers and from a direction that is behind the camera. We know this to be true by considering 2 distinct shadows. The front right cooling tower does not have any shadow from the left towers falling upon it. If you look at where the shadow of the front left tower falls, you can see it is upon the second tower from front in the right hand row. Notice also, that of the four towers in the left hand row, all are bathed in sunlight except for a vertical shadow falling on the third tower from the front. Where does this come from?
To find the answer, scroll up to an earlier, wider shot of Eggborough, where the camera has captured a tall stack. This stack is positioned well to the front of the tower with the shadow. This further confirms that in the Macleod picture, the sun is to the left and behind the camera.
Now, we can be certain that the dark shadows cannot be the result of deliberate underexposure of a back lit object. There is absolutely no explanation why the cloud appears dark in that area. Then if you look closely at the dark area, you can see that it has a straight edge to it. This is an impossible result of natural shadow, because there is no straight edge at that position that could have caused such a shadow.
The only conclusion is that the photo has been doctored to render a dark area.
I think I agree with the Prof. Photographer. The Photo was not “Photoshopped” It was created using filters and high contrast type film. The very dark blue of the sky and the unrelieved black of the towers are the dead give away.
I created some very dramatic sunset pictures in the 1970’s just by underexposing the film.Might be worth an experiment to see if one of us can reproduce this type of picture just by under exposing the film in an old 35 mm camera.