Sports Illustrated Sees Black, Goes Green

From Romenesko:

Dallas Morning News photographer Louis DeLuca knew that Baylor players wore black jerseys for this game — he watched part of it on TV — so he was surprised to see them green in Sports Illustrated. “This may not seem like a big deal to some,” he writes, “but in an age where digital manipulation can, and is, eroding the public’s confidence in what they see produced by professional photojournalists as visual truth, do we really want to do this?”

http://jimromenesko.com/2012/11/29/sports-illustrated-changes-color-of-baylor-uniforms/

 

All of college football is going green for the next month in honor of Notre Dame.

 

I saw this earlier and my first thought was, Why? Is there a point to change it? Did they just think it would make for a better photo, that the jerseys wouldn't blend so much into the background?

 

This is absurd. Don't use the photo if you don't like the way the background looks. Sports Illustrated's Leading Off has literally thousands of photos to choose from. This wasn't even a staff shot.

 

It looks like everything was affected, so had to be done with filtering, right?
But the intent is obvious, so I don't see how it could be blamed on some kind of mistake.

Just a bad, bad move. Who made that call?

 

I honestly thought this had something to do with finances and recycling.

 

Had to be made by someone high up the editorial food chain ... of course, who wants to bet that a low-level imaging tech is going to be blamed and get the boot?

 

Maybe a photog could explain better, but I grabbed the jpeg of the first version and opened it with photoshop.

The photo is very dark and as you start to lighten it, the black starts to look green. If I was wagering, the photo tech didn't know it was black jersey day, went and found the last home game to check on the green, then color corrected the green in the pants to match what he/she thought was supposed to be the green in the jersey.

Then after the photo was worked up, an editor, not knowing what the original looked like, saw the "corrected" version, thought the green really popped and said this should go in Leading Off. If they hadn't watched the game, and known it was black jersey day, there's nothing about that photo that sets off any warning bells or alarms.

SI is pretty transparent, so I'd wager it will be addressed.

 

As expected, that was pretty quick.

From Romenesko:

 

When did Phil Muschnick become SI's photo editor?

 

This was my thought as well. Seems like whoever worked on the photo assumed the jerseys were supposed to be green and the photo was just very dark. So they made the change not realizing it was a black jersey. I seriously doubt there was a decision to change the color of the jerseys.

 

Yeah, that would make sense. But with all the different uniform styles and jersey colors today, I wouldn't feel safe matching colors from some previous game.