Dal photogate which involved Kate Middleton last March and for which she was forced to publicly apologize, attention on the veracity of the royal shots is at the highest level. Ending up in the crosshairs of authenticity checks (social media), the Christmas card released by Harry and Meghan which according to some users on the web would have been clearly “falsified” with Photoshop. But what is true?
Have Harry and Meghan changed their Christmas Card?
Monday 16 December, Harry and Meghan have released their long-awaited Christmas Carda collage of six most representative photos of their 2024 between charity commitments around the world, but also of “normality” under the California sun with children Archie and Lilibet Dianawho return to “show themselves” two years after their last media foray in the Netflix doc Harry&Meghan.
In the miniature with the children, the Sussex babies, pictured from behind, run into their parents’ armsmost likely returning from a business trip with the three family dogs wagging their tails in what appears to be the driveway of their Montecito home. In the shot, the baby Wales cousins show the red hair inherited from dad Harry although, as the prince recounted at an event this year, “they were blessed with their mother’s thick hair.”
Conspiracy theories about the Sussexes’ Christmas photo
As told by Daily Mail and from Mirrorthe image has come under public scrutiny, sparking “crazy conspiracy theories”: some social users are convinced that the image has been “digitally altered”. The three legs of the black labrador, Meghan’s left arm “twice as long as a normal one” and the angle of the legs in a different direction compared to the duchess’ bust: these are the main “anomalies” found by some internet users.
For other frequenters of X, Archie would be added later with an old image counting his height almost identical to that of his sister two years younger. Several critics insisted that the images chosen for the postcard “they are deliberately low resolution to hide inconsistencies”.
“The only one in focus is Meghan. Fake photo,” wrote one person on the ex-twitter social network, while another added: “Archie doesn’t seem to have grown in over a year and his daughter seems to be as tall as him now,” but also “the grass and leaves look fake”.
A Photoshop expert contacted by Daily Mail he denied all the conjectures by stating that the photo seems authentic in every way. A leading Fleet Street photographer has said that although it appears to be “staged” to make the Sussexes appear to be “the perfect family”, it does not appear to have been created usingartificial intelligence. However, another professional specified that the “small size of the image on the postcard makes it almost impossible to know whether or not it has been modified.”
“It’s an image for today’s Instagram world. It’s not AI, but I have no doubt that it has been retouched like many other people retouch their Christmas cards before sending them”, the words of photographer Glenn Gratton to the tabloid. Case closed?
