- Yet another photo released by the British Royal Family has been flagged as manipulated.
- This time the photo is of the late Queen Elizabeth surrounded by her grandchildren taken in 2022.
- Getty Images has gone back and added a label to the image highlighting that it has been digitally enhanced.
The current obsession for internet denizens is the Royal Family. For weeks – potentially months at this point – those following the British Royal Family have indulged in all manner of conspiracy theories and we hate to admit it, but it’s the family’s own fault.
Earlier this month, in celebration of Mother’s Day in the UK, the Royal Family shared an image of the Princess of Wales surrounded by her family. Only that image was quickly retracted by the likes of Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters which noted that the image had been manipulated.
The brouhaha that the photo inspired saw conspiracies that the Princess was no longer alive given that, according to those in the know, she hadn’t been seen in public since abdominal surgery at the end of 2023.
This week, the Royal Family has been found to have submitted yet another manipulated photo only this one is over a year old.
This time the photo was of late Queen Elizabeth surrounded by her grandchildren. The photo was taken at Balmoral in August 2022 but was only released in April 2023. Now, nearly a year later, Getty Images has added additional context to the image.
“Getty Images has reviewed the image in question and placed an editor’s note on it, stating that the image has been digitally enhanced at source,” a spokesperson for Getty Images told The Guardian.
Now this doesn’t mean that the image is fake but it will inspire further conspiracies which currently include King Charles secretly being dead, Princess Kate being replaced by a body double, Prince William taking a new wife and countless others that get crazier as you dive deeper.
The photo of the Queen was reportedly snapped by the Princess of Wales herself, shortly before the Queen shuffled off her mortal coil which has raised questions about whether she edited the photo above as well. Shortly after her Mother’s Day photo was killed, the Princess reportedly apologised for editing the photo.
Both images released by the Royal Family showcase some incredibly amateurish Photoshop skills. For example, the Queen’s photo features odd shadows, hair just disappearing into a sofa and oddities in the tartan carpet in the photo.
If Kate is indeed editing photos before sending them out, she should stop because any touch-ups being done are clearly sending alarm bells through the media and triggering conspiracy theorists on TikTok.
Cancel your Adobe Creative Cloud subscription Kate and if you really need to edit photos, try Photopea. Just make a small donation first.
