Photographer Peter Duke: ‘60 Minutes’ Used Visual Manipulation in Bannon Interview

DUKE: “I wanted to talk a little bit today about color correction and grading and about how it can be used to make people look better or worse on television. This is a still frame of Steve Bannon from the ‘60 Minutes’ interview that’s going to run tonight. And the first thing I noticed was that there were red circles around his eyes and his lips looked cherry-red. And I also noticed that the curtains in the background looked really orange.

"Now, I met Steve Bannon and I know what he looks like. He’s Irish and he does have kind of paper skin, but he doesn’t have pronounced red circles around his eyes. That’s not who he is in real life. So I started comparing the two shots of Charlie Rose and Steve Bannon to see what kind of differences I could find and it was very interesting. The first thing that you need to take a look at is the color and saturation. Those drapes in the Breitbart Embassy in Washington, D.C. are actually the same color.

"Now, the light lighting them might be slightly closer or farther away which accounts for the brightness, but they are the same color. And you can see from these two shots that they are definitely not the same color. If you take a look at Charlie Rose’s shirt, it’s bluer. It’s about thirteen units of blue from neutral, which means that they’ve graded it into a cooler shot. It does a couple of things. It makes his makeup look less clownish and it also knocks down the contrast a little bit. I’m going to do the same thing to Steve. I’m going to make it a little bit bluer and I’m also going to lighten up the shadows a little bit just to make it a little bit less contrasty.

"And voila! The bloodshot eyes have gone. Now I’m going to do to Charlie what they did to Steve. I’m going to kick up the saturation, the red, the orange, and I’m going to increase the contrast. So here’s the two shots before and after. Before... and after. And here’s what the pictures would look like if they were graded similarly. Steve doesn’t have red circles around his eyes, Charlie’s makeup is subtle, you can’t really tell he’s got it on unless you’re looking, and Steve doesn’t look like the monster that they want you to think that he is.”

(Via RealClearPolitics)