Does BP Need Photoshop Lessons?
Once again, BP has been caught in a crisis of its own making. The revelation that it used Photoshop to alter images of the Command Center monitoring the Gulf oil spill crisis does not lend strength to the petroleum behemoth’s credibility.
BP says there is “nothing sinister” in the image alteration. What it apparently did is add some images to video screens that were blank in the original image. It seems reasonable to think the PR folks thought it might seem like a bad thing to have blank screens monitoring the situation. They would be right about that, of course. One has to wonder why the screens were blank during critical hours at the Command Center, and what should have been being monitored that wasn’t...
Stephen Beals is a veteran prepress manager with some 30 years of experience in the commercial print business. He has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and owns the website "Printoolz" for software for print and multimedia production. Stephen also founded his own murder mystery dinner theatre troupe and is a Presbyterian pastor.
