I found this interesting split-screen pic
I know little to nothing about Photoshop but if the editor of the paper believes that "the photo was adjusted for sharpness and brightness" then why is it her skin tone remains consistant and it's her eyes only that have been 'adjusted'--painted a solid bright white and her pupils narrowed to resemble a cat's eye? The picture was in the hands of an over-zealous highschool grad intern?
And why did it get the approval of the person who did the layout?
I mentioned something for the first part, but here we go again. Eyes get a special treatment first..whitening, much like teeth get whitened sometimes. If they aren't whitened, once the photo gets reduced in size for digital editions, they look far worst than before.
Files get 'resampled' - or have their contrast redone either manually or automatically. If it's a lot of pictures, a macro will do all the work with the occasional look by the GD. In the case of a web-site like this one, I'm assuming that they don't have someone doing all the pictures one by one, but trust it to a macro.
*Remember - we're not talking about the printed edition - only the web-edition.
Most times, the effect is fine..sometimes it isn't. Images then get uploaded to a database. The web-site fetches the text, images, ads, links etc...from the database and puts together, or lays out the page. There is no 'person who did the layout' - it's automated.
So, of course, it's automatically approved.
As for the result - for all I know, someone did retouch the automatically-modified photo. Maybe she looked too pale and someone went in and just modded the eyes and uploaded it.
If the whole photo had been lightened, the web-site would probably have been attacked for trying to turn Ms. Rice into a white woman
I think that the resulting image was unfortunate...but it was caught, fixed and owned up to.
