Photoshopping

Modeling the new wind jacket that Mom and Frank bought me.

Word count: 38066
This chunk (for reference's sake): 397
Percent of current: 1.04
Percent of target: .794

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It draws me back in. I zoom in on the picture, on the spot where, in my copy of the photo, I am lying, posing while unconscious. I look for any signs of alterations trying to see if I had been stripped out of the picture by some highly-trained digital photography expert. I find nothing. There’s nothing that looks like it’s been brushed or blurred; no obvious repeating patterns that would indicate a copy and paste; not a single pixel out of place.
I go back to the bathroom and fish my wallet out of my pants. I retrieve the photo with me in it and take it back to the study. I flip on the scanner and digitize the image, hoping to take a look at it as well, trying to see if I’d been stripped into this one. Again, I come up with nothing.
I’m no Photoshop expert, but I’ve done my share of forging images. It’s not what you think: I never doctored something to close a case; never falsified evidence. But sometimes clients want what they want and when money was tight, I was willing to give it to them. The point is that I’ve seen falsified pictures before and even those that are very good at doing it will leave some trace that the picture isn’t 100% legitimate.
Maybe the people who did this are better than very good. They certainly haven’t pulled any punches or spared any expense when it has come to any other aspect of this drama. I sit back in my chair, looking at the pictures side by side and wonder what they could possibly mean. The woman in the photos is in the exact same pose in both pictures. The floors appear the same, though the lighting isn’t good enough, even when I fiddle with the levels, to compare the grain of the wood.
I think about the cigarettes in the drawer, lean forward to grab them and that’s when I see a shadow across the woman’s face that doesn’t continue onto the floor. I look closer and sure enough, there is just the faintest trace of a second light source being obscured by another presence in the room. In the photo that I’m in, the shadow continues uninterrupted. I wonder how much they paid whoever did the doctoring. Whatever it was, it was probably too much.