I don’t have one coherent theory for exactly what happened with the The Mother’s Day Photo Catastrophe of 2024. I’ve watched some of the TikToks and seen a lot of the tweets, and my best guess is that originally, this was a months-old photo which was recently and poorly edited, and they plopped an even older pic of “Kate’s head” onto the months-old photo to create some kind of Frankenstein’s monster of a Mother’s Day portrait. Then Kensington Palace arrogantly decided that everything looked great and people were too stupid to figure out what was done, and that’s when everything went sideways. One of the most egregious lies, in my opinion, is the insistence that William took the photo last week. Like, KP is still sticking with that as their official story, which is bonkers. In the past 48 hours, photo experts and professional analysts have come out of the woodwork to figure out what the hell happened here. Many of them have settled on the “Kate’s head was plopped onto this photo” theory too.
The digital fingerprint of the Princess of Wales’s family photograph suggests that she merged multiple images using Photoshop. Analysis of data embedded in the image indicates that a copy and paste function was used, most likely in the section featuring her face. The method appears to be confirmed by the clear horizontal line stretching across the Princess’s chest, albeit not exactly in line.
The “metadata” suggests that the photograph was taken on Friday at Adelaide Cottage, the family’s Windsor home. The first edit was made at 9.54pm that evening, with the second at 9.39am on Saturday morning. Data show that the image was saved in photo editing software Adobe Photoshop twice on an Apple Mac.
The photograph was taken on a Canon 5D mark IV, which retails at £2,929, using a Canon 50mm lens, which is priced at £1,629. The Prince of Wales took the photograph.
Yeah, the “merging multiple photos” or Frankenstein Photo Theory is a popular one and I think it makes sense. It would also explain Kensington Palace’s refusal to release “the original” photo, because their web of lies would unravel quickly, especially if this was based on a photo taken last November(and not by William). CNN got an MIT professor on the case and this guy says it was a Frankenstein image.
There are three types of photo manipulation, according to Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at MIT Media Lab who’s worked on special photography and images projects for Apple and Facebook over the years: appearance, where the tones or lighting may change; geometric, which involves moving around subjects or objects; and generative AI, a more recent concept that allows users to write text prompts that generate completely new images. He said Kate’s picture appeared to have both appearance and geometric changes, and was likely not AI-generated.
“The manipulation in this image is very unique,” he said, noting changes that impacted the placement of her children’s clothing. “It’s unlikely that it was ever one single image. A photo editing app probably introduced these errors.”
He said he believes the “subtle” edits were done very finely, potentially with a third-party app or editing software such as Photoshop, versus using built-in smartphone tools. He noted that similar errors can occur if a user starts splicing and merging different images together. “It all comes from real pieces of photos, but it’s more like a collage.”
But even Photoshop is becoming less complex to use with the introduction of generative-AI tools being added directly to the software. Although Kate’s errors are apparent, Raskar said it will soon become harder to identify the authenticity of images. Image tools with generative AI will allow so much more than photo manipulation because people will be able to create images from completely new scenarios.
All of which to say, this really is a f–k up on a global scale. Multiple global news outlets “killing” a palace-issued Frankenstein photo, an international audience analyzing how badly palace employees are at photo-editing, and worse yet, Prince William and his staff are too f–king stupid, incompetent and arrogant to crisis-manage in a real way. They really believed their domestic and international audience would eat this up and no one would question it. Now their credibility is gone. At some point this week, I might create a list of all of the things William has lied about just in the past two years, because it’s A LOT.
Cover courtesy of British Vogue, photos courtesy of Kensington Palace.