Retouching Blunders Cause China to Invest in Photoshop Research

You would think that after suffering world wide bad press for horrible political Photoshopping that things might change in China's propaganda strategies. Maybe something as simple as mandatory government Photoshop classes, maybe just a bound notebook of internet tutorials. Something to change the apparent lack of general image editing knowledge. Instead of education however, the government has apparently decided on a different course of action. Rather than the obvious solution they have opted to invest in researching technology to detect whether or not an image has been altered.

"Research teams at major universities have received funding from the central government to come up with ways to help the authorities quickly determine whether an image has been manipulated by photo-editing software such as Photoshop." Says the South China Morning Post

With blackmail of officials becoming a thriving business the Chinese government has sought out to come up with technical solutions for spotting faked images. I guess in the grand scheme I can understand that line of reasoning. It would be much more convincing to have a computer program prove a fake than a number of government sponsored "image experts" challenge it's validity.  However it still doesn't really address the disasters released from within the government. Like our floating man below:

Maybe working with Photoshop every day has corrupted my view of just how difficult it is to retouch something well. At least we can take comfort in the fact that even with all of the advances in image technology it still doesn't prevent stuff like that from being produced.

Via PetaPixel