A photographer has outed Samsung after she caught them using her photo to demonstrate the alleged capabilities of their new Galaxy A8 Star. What’s more, in the post she wrote about it on DIYPhotography, she revealed the photo in question was taken with a DSLR.
Dunja Djudjic had been using photo licensing site EyeEm, a partner of Getty, to sell some of her images. A few weeks ago, she received an email congratulating her on a photo sale. The image was, in her own words, “a portrait of me goofing around.”
Intrigued by its usage, Djudjic took to Google’s reverse image search tool in an attempt to find exactly where it had been placed on the internet. Surprised to find it on Samsung’s website, the image had been photoshopped to adjust her skin and also hair colour. Her natural eye blood vessels had all but been removed, too.
Interestingly, she had been cut out of the photo and pasted onto a new image of a park. Djudjic’s original image had been shot with a shallow depth-of-field, and in need of a sharper background, Samsung had stuck the portrait onto an entirely new picture, for use in their before and after slider.
The photo as it appears on Samsung's website.
It takes months to get image sales info through from EyeEm, but Djudjic is confident the phone giant has legitimately purchased the photo for its usage. However, it’s strange and somewhat misleading that they would use a photo taken with a DSLR and fake it for an example of the Galaxy A8 Star’s capabilities, even if they were just illustrating depth of field effects. You know, if the phone’s camera is so great and all.
This story comes from Dunja Djudjic and was originally posted on DIY Photography. You can see more of Djudjic's work at her Behance, Flickr and EyeEm.
Well, there's an 'oops' moment! Phone people will do anything in an attempt to make consumers believe that a phone camera is 'just as good' as a DSLR.
So given the amount of effort it probably took to either create the fake sharp background or locate the original location to photograph and do a composite, you would think that it would have been cheaper and less time consuming to just hire a model and have one of the workers with a DSLR just take two photos rather than go through the trouble of digging through a stock site...
Delegated to an intern who didn't think twice about it and had a morning to kill?
While a popular joke, let's be real. Something like this doesn't get delegated to an intern at a company with resources like Samsung... A bunch of presumably competent people likely sat around in committee and came to this bizarre decision to pull an image from a stock site and the whole thing likely passed through many sets of eyes and was signed off by multiple levels of administration before making its way to the outside world.
It's mind numbing to think about...
I was thinking the same thing. I really don't get the reasoning or logic in them doing this. At least if they hire the photographer and model they can make them sign NDA's. Lol
You forgot to mention that immediately below the photo is the caption "Image simulated for demo purpose". Wow, yeah, Samsung is really trying to pull the wool over our eyes with this one! Great journalism.
It’s more asking the question of why exactly they feel the need to simulate it
What I find more puzzling is that Samsung feels the need to "simulate" something with a different device that they claim their own device can do. If their device can do what they say this fake photo simulates, why not just do with the Samsung?
The same reason all sorts of other advertisements simulate stuff rather than show actual results. It makes it look better than it is.
The ears from the portrait are also out of focus and it's strange to make DOF simulation and blur the background with face that it's not all in focus :-) Other question is that the image quality is like taken on a smartphone and even worse the edit from the samsung's team is terrible!
https://www.samsung.com/hk_en/smartphones/galaxy-a8-star-g885/SM-G8850ZW...