BP Photoshop Saga: More Doctored Images Surface

"We've instructed our postproduction team to refrain from doing cutting and pasting in the future," a company spokesman told London's Daily Telegraph today.

The second obvious Photoshop job was identified Tuesday by the blog Gizmodo, which received a tip that a BP image of a helicopter overlooking the spill containment site had been dramatically edited.

Have a look, first at the Photoshopped image that BP Gizmodo's tipster spotted online:

BP America, Flickr

Altered image from inside helicopter

Now here's the original, unaltered image:

BP America, Flickr

Original image from inside helicopter

The big change, as is plain to see, is that someone erased the deck of the platform that the helicopter was resting on and pasted in additional seawater. The editing job doesn't go far enough to fool the keen observer, though, as it contains telltale signs of manipulation: white space by the edge of the water; the instrument panel on the helicopter shows it is still in park; a control tower looms suspiciously close to the cockpit; and, most ridiculous of all, a water bottle rests on top of the cabin that is supposedly in motion.

As Gizmodo pointed out today, BP has created a Flickr set to come clean on all of its bad Photoshop jobs. And what do you know: It includes a third doctored image, this one of a conference room where the crisis response team is having a meeting. To be fair, this photo has only been color corrected and otherwise shows comparatively far less significant changes. See for yourself.

Photoshopped conference room:

BP America, Flickr

Sim Ops altered image

Original:

BP America, Flickr

Sim Ops original image

BP's Photoshopping saga began on Monday, when AMERICAblog's John Aravosis pointed out that a photo of BP's high-tech crisis command center posted on the company website contained a number of glaring clues that three extra video images had been pasted into the image.

The Washington Post and several blogs picked up the story, and BP responded by admitting that the image had indeed been altered, blaming the photographer and postproduction team for the changes and saying it was a rare occurrence and would not happen again.