Just to clarify: no robots were involved in photoshopping the image. Regardless of the author's "trusted source's" statement, the image is clearly shopped to remove the score overlays on a video still (as @mrnibbles <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2571979" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2571979</a> mentions). The cloned areas of the original image indicate that whatever entity did the shopping had a contextual understanding of the image, which means it was a human (<a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2236/5733655921_b28748984b_o.png" rel="nofollow">http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2236/5733655921_b28748984b_o....</a> -> <a href="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5101/5734289061_34f76398e9_b.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5101/5734289061_34f76398e9_b....</a> -- note that the foreground subjects are not `cloned`).<p>This was either a quick hack job by a person, or the work of an extremely sophisticated machine vision program.
Looks to me like someone has cloned areas to cover the score overlays that were present in the original.<p>You can see a line in the top right of the manipulated image - <a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2236/5733655921_b28748984b_o.png" rel="nofollow">http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2236/5733655921_b28748984b_o....</a><p>Which matches the position of the score banner shown on the original - <a href="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5101/5734289061_34f76398e9_b.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5101/5734289061_34f76398e9_b....</a><p>Unlikely this was done 'accidentally'
Huh? Since when does "In no way would we manipulate any photos" equate to having software automatically shuffle people around in the stands?<p>I bet this software automatically manipulates photos for them every single day.
Sounds like this could be a seam-carving or patch-match algorithm in play. These are used to resize images without distortion.<p>A research video called "Image Resizing by Seam Carving"<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NcIJXTlugc" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NcIJXTlugc</a>
This is most certainly an artifact of using "content-aware fill" in Photoshop CS5.<p><a href="http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2010/03/caf_in_ps.html" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2010/03/caf_in_ps.html</a>
I was half hoping this would be a picture of a Florida Marlins game edited to actually have fans in attendance :-P (I'm from Miami)<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/miamism/3655690286/" rel="nofollow">http://www.flickr.com/photos/miamism/3655690286/</a>