t turns out that the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year — the largest and most prestigious press photography award — was, in actual fact, a fake.

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More: Conservative Group Photoshops Out Minorities in Mailer Opposing Pro-Voting Legislation

A conservative group connected to Colorado’s Secretary of State has been sending political mailers — including a picture of a darker-skinned woman whose face was digitally removed and replaced with a white woman’s face — in an attempt to oppose a landmark voting bill that may soon become law.

Colorado is currently considering a major piece of legislation to improve the state’s voting laws by implementing Election Day Registration, automatically sending mail ballots to every voter, and creating a real-time voter database to detect and prevent fraud. It passed the House last week and will now be taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a frequent speaker at True The Vote events who uses his perch to warn about the supposed threat of voter fraud, is leading opposition to the bill, which is supported by a number of Republican County Clerks and the Colorado County Clerks Association.

Now, a dark money group named the “Citizens for Free and Fair Elections”, which lists its address as that of Gessler’s former firm, the Hackstaff Law Group, is sending out photoshopped mailers in an attempt to pressure the election clerks into switching their position.

Here is the mailer:

Mailer

The mailer’s background was taken from the following Getty Images photo:

Original photo from Getty Images

Read more at Think Progress.

Remember when you were a kid and you used to stare up into the clouds and pick out shapes and animals? Well Chris Keegan has taken that timeless exercise to whole new level by applying it to photos of space from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

A London-based illustrator by day, Keegan says he was particularly interested in the way the photos allowed him to play with scale. He usually works with much smaller ideas and objects, so playing with something as big as the stars was liberating.

“In one picture you can see thousands of stars and the idea of having a person or a bird taking up that sort of size was quite unusual,” he says.

More: Photoshopped NASA Photos Give New Life to Outer-Space Imagery

One of my favorite blogs, Photoshop Disasters, released their top 10 from 2012

psdisasters.com

For example: Image: sem-titulo-2.jpg

Pelosi Office Releases Doctored Photo - 113th Congress - Fox Nation

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office sent a photo of female lawmakers to press Thursday to commemorate a huge moment for the Democratic Party: The first time its House of Representatives caucus didn’t have a majority of white men.

Unfortunately, four members were late to the photo shoot.

‘Please note this version has the four Members who were late photo-shopped in,’ Pelosi spokesperson Drew Hammill wrote in an email to news outlets Thursday evening. In a subsequent email to Poynter, Hammill confirmed that the four latecomers were placed in the rear of the group.

Here’s the Associated Press version of the photo:

AP Photo

And here’s the photo Pelosi’s office released:

Photoshopped image

Read more: nation.foxnews.com

ZOMG ITZ A FAUXTOGRAPHY FAUXTRAGE!1!1TY

I recently had to create a custom Twitter header for my job, so I decided to go ahead and save a template in case anyone else wants to make one and isn’t sure how. I know Charles briefly explained it when he created his, but having the exact dimensions as well as a template might help. The basics are as follows:

Recommended dimensions: 1252×626 pixels
File Type: JPG, PNG, or GIF
Maximum file size: 5MB

Here’s a PNG file showing the dimensions:

Click to enlarge

Feel free to save it and pass it along. I’ve also created a layered Photoshop template for those who are comfortable going that route. You can download it from here.

Keep in mind that Twitter will automatically put a gradient overlay on top of your profile header to ensure that the white text of the profile info is always legible, so take that into consideration when choosing your colors. The white border around your profile pic/avatar is also something that cannot be changed.

Note: Twitter uses responsive web design for their page layout, which means the elements are designed to be fluid and will expand/contract proportionally based on the device they’re being viewed on. There are some examples as well as ideas & insructions on this page.

Additionally, this page at the Twitter Help Center tells you how to change your profile & header images, and if you scroll down to the bottom you’ll also find a brief video tutorial.

theatlantic.com

In 1989, TV Guide put television’s celebrity-du-jour, Oprah Winfrey, on its cover, perching her upon a pile of money. The picture was exactly the kind of thing that tends to sell magazines on newsstands and in supermarket check-out lines: It was friendly, it was saucy, it was sparkly. The only problem was that it wasn’t, actually, Oprah. TV Guide had taken a picture of the talk show host’s face … and grafted it onto the body of ’60s star Ann-Margaret. The magazine had asked the permission of neither woman before it published its odd bit of Frankensteinery. 

Photoshop was invented in 1987 and widely distributed, for the first time, in 1990; the TV Guide debacle would mark one of the last times that art editors had to physically splice images to create new manipulations. But a lack of Photoshop, while the software ushered in our present age of doctored photography, did nothing to stop would-be fakers from their, er, fauxtography.

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abclocal.go.com

The John Locke Foundation said Thursday a blogger for its website has resigned after posting a picture of President Obama dressed in drag.

The photo was accompanied by the headline “Obama Goes Gay To Get NC On Election Day” in the “Meck Deck” section of the Locke website which features issues primarily in the Charlotte area.

ABC11 has opted to not post the picture which appeared to use Photoshop or some other image editing software to paste the president’s head on a body wearing a skin-tight shiny green leotard with matching knee-high high heel boots. A bucket of fried chicken was placed between his legs.

The post quickly drew criticism from groups like the North Carolina NAACP, which called it highly offensive.

John Locke President John Hood agreed, and said he was embarrassed and angered by what he saw.

“The illustration associated with this blog entry was offensive and utterly inappropriate for our blog or anyone else’s. A reader brought it to my attention Wednesday. I had it removed immediately, but the damage was done. I’m sorry I didn’t see it earlier, and I’m deeply sorry it was on our website for any length of time,” Hood said in a statement.

Hood said the blogger - Tara Servatius - resigned Thursday morning. Hood said if she had not, he would have fired her.

“I’d already decided she couldn’t be a contributor to the site anymore,” he said.

Hood said Servatius had total editing rights on the blog and no one approved the offensive posting.

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