Van der Leun Strikes Out

Gerard Van der Leun, "editor" of Pajamas Media -- that guy -- sees a photo of Obama in The Washington Post and asks:

Is it just us or are the images of Barack Obama promulgated by the MSM in the last week getting more and more like the glowing Russian icons for sale in cheap shops in Brighton Beach?

Yes, Gerard, it's just you and (of course) Putz. The funny thing is, Van der Leun's colleague, Bill Bradley, calls him on it:

Actually, Obama looks like crap in that picture.

Van der Leun, not one to leave a sinking ship, replies:

On the contrary, cher Bradley, he is the very model of the modern American idol, and somebody is moving heaven and earth and the pixel highlighting tool to make him seem that way.

Bradley's a champ, so he tries again:

No, actually, he looks like ****, Gerard.

Any clown can make him look much better than that.

You're seeing things.

At which point Van der Leun decides it's time to send another link Don Surber's way.

Then, PJs readers -- who are clearly tired of Van der Leun's nonsense -- take Bradley's lead and stick Gerard's head on a pike:

One of the wonderful things about blogs is that errors can be caught and corrected quickly.

The image that you label "Eyes in the original at Getty Images" is clearly at a lower resolution then the one from the one published by the Washington Post. A little more investigation shows that while the image you clipped that from has a resolution of 396x594 pixels, Getty Images lists the original as 3504x2336. I assume that you have to pay to get the high res original picture.

At the very least you should re-label the image to not claim it is from the original. Beyond that I'm not sure how you can make claims of what the Washington Post has done with Photoshop when you have not seen the original.

and

Ditto. The Getty image looks like a seriously compressed thumbnail, not the full-resolution image you'd be paying for.

Now, a photoshop jockey may have tweaked the colors a little- it's not uncommon for a pro image editor to have their system set up to do this pretty much automatically*, but I doubt anyone would add skin blemishes and pores, individual hairs in the eyebrows, retouched the catchlights in the eyes, and removed the 'grid' artifacts from the JPEG compression.

*I used to do tech support for graphic designers, shifting colors in images to ones the printers could output was standard practice, and frequently automated. I expect the WaPo has a similar system.

Writes another, "This post makes me squirm." Join the club, pal. My own theory about this bullshit is that Republicans in general, Gerard in particular, are uncomfortable with the Dems having such a good-looking candidate. Instead of simply acknowledging that embracing civil liberties, pulling out of Iraq and not treating gays like sub-humans is good for the skin as well as the soul, they -- being the lazy cretins that they are -- resort to accusations of inappropriate Photoshopping.