'The Last Photo': The key questions

hey rosa i totally agree her poor arm looks very brusied in the tennis pic and it clearly is brusing how can it be mistaken for suntan is beyond me [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

It may be just me but is there anyone else who thinks that the child by the swimming pool doesn't look like the same one at the tennis court?

Marian I showed those pictures to someone only half and hour ago and they said the exact same thing. You seem to have the dark eyed girl and the very blonde one.

Thanks littlepixie I'm glad it's not just me! Are there any photographic experts out there who could examine both these photos and perhaps compare them with the footage of Madeleine on the airport bus where Gerry makes the infamous comment that he's not there to enjoy himself. I know that the footage is of poor quality but I imagine that it could be enhanced.

i think even the poolside photo of her doesnt look right Gerry and Amelie look like they are both have some sunburn their skin looks red and hot and madeleine looks like like she hasnit really been in the sun at all with her pale skin weres her sunburn on her arms gone? i think poolside photo is of a younger Madeleine which could of been photoshopped into the photo
THE LAST 5 PHOTOS ARE VERY STRANGE
i will try to get them up

I work with digital media for a living and have done for nigh on 15 years now. I've looked at, created, dissected and laughed at many, many photoshops in my time. Some brilliant, some laughably bad. I spent some time a year or so back looking at the "last photo" and my professional opinion is that it's utterly genuine. Sorry! I may be wrong, of course as there are some brilliant photoshop artists out there, but the level of fine detail including stray hairs and so on is just too perfect to be a photoshop. The arguments I've seen about shadows and suchlike are, I believe, spurious. Sometimes the light does funny things to skin tones depending on the angle it strikes the subject.

Anyhow, it's just my opinion. I do have some experience in this sort of thing but I'm not infallible so it is only an opinion.

Thanks for your comments C Edwards; I think that this debate will rumble on though! I agree with Rosa that the picture of Madeleine at the pool does not look as if it was taken when she was nearly four. I also do not believe that the girl at the playground wearing pink trousers and top is the same as the one at the tennis court.

Could you give us an opinion on the photo of Madeleine without the elbow, the one put on display in the church and other places. Is it clear that this is the one which was photoshopped, because clearly one or the other was.

Marian wrote:Thanks for your comments C Edwards; I think that this debate will rumble on though! I agree with Rosa that the picture of Madeleine at the pool does not look as if it was taken when she was nearly four. I also do not believe that the girl at the playground wearing pink trousers and top is the same as the one at the tennis court.

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hi marian i agree with you and look at the playground photo the mccanns said it was a photo of Gerry with the 3 kids then look carefully at Amelie at that time she had white blonde hair and was smaller and Petermac made a good coment

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[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] by PeterMac on Sat May 14, 2011 9:53 pmCould you give us an opinion on the photo of Madeleine without the elbow, the one put on display in the church and other places. Is it clear that this is the one which was photoshopped, because clearly one or the other was.

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The best quality version of the pic I've seen is here: link to big pic

Looking closely at Madeleine's outline, I simply don't think it's possible to photshop someone into a picture with that degree of accuracy. The flyaway hairs visible over the background rocks would be almost impossible to recreate without some aberrations and tell-tale marks. The very "edge" of Madeleine shows customary fringing that you see on consumer digital cameras from that era (it's almost like a strange very thin halo effect) and looks identical to that around Amelie and Gerry too if you know what to look for.

The "altar pic" is a photoshopped version of the original big one. The elbow has been taken out to take away the distraction, in my opinion. Someone has used a simple clone brush tool to sample another part of the rock wall and overlay it to hide the elbow. Then they've blurred it a bit to hide the details. I've not seen an "unblurred" one with the elbow taken out. Point me at it if you know of one please! It would be relatively trivial to do an unblurred one anyway, to be honest. 10 minutes work at most.

Amelie is kicking at the water (you can see water drops flying up) and the whole thing about Gerry's leg shadow is baloney in my opinion. In the position he's sitting, his leg shadow would be "underneath" where Amelie is sitting but you can't see it as she's in the way of that part of the pool wall, obviously! Madeleine is mugging for the camera as far as I can tell - she's probably making a scene about it being cold water - I have similar "drama queen" pics of my girls at that age making a fuss about cold water or a "huge" 1 inch spider... ;-) It looks like a normal family pic and it fills me with sadness, to be honest, to know what was about to befall that poor girl.

The "black line" mentioned behind Amelie's arm is simply the lip of the stone to the pool edge (half a centimetre or so?) that is catching the shadow from Gerry/Amelie. There was a poster on a forum once that posted a picture from the same place and there was no black lip - this is because the shadow wasn't being cast onto the lip at that point as no-one else was in the picture. Digital cameras can only handle a cerain amount of light range ("stops") and if the dynamic range in the pic is too much, detail is lost. In the big original picture, there are lots of very bright white bits that will cause a loss of range in shadows and cause some differences in what they eye would see in comparison.

I can't be 100% certain, but I would say, if asked for an opinion, that the original big picture is completely genuine. If it is a photoshop it is probably the best I've ever seen.

Judging by the colour and length of the hair of the girl with her back to the camera in the playground (and who cannot be Amelie) she could be the child in the tennis court photo.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] Today at 10:57 pm

The best quality version of the pic I've seen is here: link to big pic

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That photo is AWESOME thankyou C.Edwards

Marian wrote:Judging by the colour and length of the hair of the girl with her back to the camera in the playground (and who cannot be Amelie) she could be the child in the tennis court photo.

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i agree Marian do you think the child in the tennis court is wearing the same hat Amelie has on in the pool photo? and thanks for all the info C.Edwards i'll have to read it a few times as its very technical and im only a beginner

Many thanks. I have never seen the photo at that size before.
What do you make of the pinkish line just behind M's left upper arm, between the bottom of the hair and the thistle growing behind her.
Or the grey line on the rock behind Gerry's left upper arm, which seems to follow exactly the contour of his arm.

PeterMac wrote:Many thanks. I have never seen the photo at that size before.
What do you make of the pinkish line just behind M's left upper arm, between the bottom of the hair and the thistle growing behind her.
Or the grey line on the rock behind Gerry's left upper arm, which seems to follow exactly the contour of his arm.

Have had a close look at both blown up in photoshop. The line near gerry's arm is just a coincidental pattern in the rock I think. Can't see anything out of the ordinary on that at all. I thought the same of Madeleine's at first but I'm not quite so sure now I've spent more time looking. I thought it was just a small part of a fold of material from her top showing there, but I'm not sure about the colour. The camera would mess with the colour slightly in the shadow of her arm there, but, hmmm... Dunno. I'll look at it a bit more. That sort of thing is a classic photoshop mistake where the cutting out has just missed a bit, but normally such mistakes follow, for example, an arm line or something. That extends beyond it. Just seeing the hair strands in the blown up version only strengthens my opinion that this is genuine. To do those strands would be a work of art in photoshop! Way beyond my skills and I'm no mug.

Rosa - the picture on the right has just had the clone stamp tool used to blot out gerry & amelie. I can see the repeating pattern in the rock wall behind her.

Is there a technical reason why the background of the rocks and the thistles is sharp in the "last photo" and fuzzy in the photoshopped one ?

PeterMac wrote:Is there a technical reason why the background of the rocks and the thistles is sharp in the "last photo" and fuzzy in the photoshopped one ?

No... it's not technical it's the digital equivalent of, I dunno, polyfilla I suppose! It has the effect of concentrating the eye on the foreground subject and it hides the more obvious "joins" where bits of the photo have been duplicated in the background. It's easy to see the repeating patter of rocks in the photo Rosa posted - rocks from near the top right have been copied and pasted over rocks to the top left to blot out gerry and Amelie's arms.

It's really, really easy to do and doesn't require any great skill.

Rosa: no I don't think that the hats are the same. The one at the tennis court looks a darker shade of pink and when I enlarged it to 400% (the largest I can do) I could see that it has some kind of pattern on it which the other one does not.

Does anyone know how photos are investigated by the police i imagine a photoshopped photo as having added layers or layer removed do they strip of the layers somehow to get back to the original with some technic.
The 5 last photos is really the 4 last photos because of how they photoshop the pool photo and remove Gerrys elbow