Current mood:	self-frickin'-righteous
Entry tags:	attack ad, campaign, clinton, obama, primary

a blogger's life
About two weeks ago, my blog articles at http://iconoclasm.gather.com started showing up as regular sources in Google News.  Not Google blog search, but the mainstream news, alongside nytimes and folks like that.

My first thought was "WOW!  I'm so excited!"  My second thought was "Wow.  That and $1.79 plus tax/tip will get me a coffee at Au Bon Pain."

And tonight I have a breaking blog article to write -- and Gather's down for upgrades.  So y'all get to see the meat of it first.  "My tablets!  My tablets!"  I can't go to bed until I jot this one down *somewhere*.

DailyKOS published an article that's getting a little play today, alleging that the Clinton campaign published an attack ad that intentionally colorized Obama's skin to darker, reminiscent of TIME colorizing OJ back in the day.

Here's dailyKOS's image from the debate video on the left, and the ad video on the right.



So, I played with desaturation, which is what the Clinton campaign said that they used to alter the image -- just a standard video effect, they said.  Below is my image, trying to match the left and right sides.  It very neatly came to -33% lightness, -33% saturation.  Those controls are on the same filter control panel, but it sounds *so* much better to say "We just used saturation/desaturation" than "We took his face down 33% for saturation/lightness."



But here's the kicker -- look at the shirt on the left, and the shirt on the right.  Notice how dingy the white shirt gets with the saturation/lightness lowered?  This means to get the effect above, they had to *mask* either Obama's face or the shirt, frame by frame, to get the shirt to look right and the face to look dark.

Yup, just a casual Photoshop effect.  My ass.

And you get to see it before it hits Google News.  *hee*