A photo editor says it's 'astonishing' Kensington Palace released the recent image of Kate Middleton
Patrick Witty
- Multiple agencies retracted a picture of Kate Middleton and her kids due to concerns of digital manipulation.
- The image was taken by Prince William and shared by Kensington Palace on social media.
- Some of the issues in the photo could be a result of smartphone features, said a photo editor.
Multiple photo agencies have retracted a picture of Kate Middleton and her children due to concerns that the image could have been digitally manipulated.
Kensington Palace released the image of Middleton and her children — Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis — on Sunday, writing that the photo was taken by Price William. The post on X has been viewed more than 67 million times to date.
Middleton was last seen in public on Christmas Day, and this is the first official photo of her that has since been released. Kensington Palace previously announced that Middleton underwent a planned abdominal surgery in January.
Several inconsistencies in the photo, including blurred edges along body parts and window panes, have sparked speculation that the photo was photoshopped or AI-generated.
One photo editor who dissected the image told Business Insider he was surprised the photo was released in the first place.
"It's astonishing that Kensington Palace released it, and even more bewildering that the wires distributed it," said Patrick Witty. Witty was a photo editor at The New York Times from 2004 to 2010 and a deputy director of photography at National Geographic from 2016 to 2017.
Witty also shared a marked-up version of the image, in which he drew white circles around the areas that raised red flags for him.
"The first issue that I noticed was the weirdness around Charlotte's left wrist — a portion of her sleeve strangely disappears," Witty said.
"Another glaring problem is with the zipper on Kate's jacket. It's as if that area was sloppily pasted and misaligned," he added.
He also said there are "over a dozen areas around Kate's head that are unnatural" and look "as if they took the expression from one image and pasted it on top of this one."
Some of the latter could be attributed to smartphone camera settings, Witty said.
"A lot of the issues with this photo could have been caused by Portrait mode or perhaps the "Best Take" mode on the Google Pixel 8," Witty said. The "Best Take" feature automatically chooses the most flattering expression for each person in a group photo and merges them into one image, Witty said.
Witty said the background of the photo, which appears blurry and pixelated, could be the result of a phone camera blurring the background so the focus is on the subject.
In a post shared on Kensington Palace's X account on Monday morning, Middleton said her own photo editing was to blame.
"Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother's Day," Middleton wrote in the post.
Reuters, Agence France-Presse, and the Associated Press all issued kill notifications to media outlets over the image. While the move has further stoked the speculation over the authenticity of the image, the move is not unhead of for agencies, Vivek Prakash, the APAC managing director for Getty Images, told BI.
"It is not unusual for wires and agencies to retract images for a variety of routine reasons, manipulation being among them," said Prakash.
"All agencies do take retractions extremely seriously, so it would not have been done without careful consideration," Prakash added.
Kensington Palace did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.