Originally posted by Connection
You should familiarize yourself with Adobe Photoshop and its capabilities before you reach conclusions.
Some of the images are real, but most are clear photoshops. When you work with the program, you can easily see the subtle chages in coloration, alignment, blurring, and depth. The person who photoshopped them is not even that talented, yet good enough to fool anyone close minded enough not to pay attention to detail. He must be either a prankster, or an extremist.
There is a lot of evidence that the image you posted is a photoshop, since I am working with Photoshop right now I'll just point out a few clear ones
1.) Out of depth ® symbol. it is misaligned relative to the diagonal tilt of the NY letters.
2.) Digitally extended carboard. A poor job, since on the right the cardboard suddenly loses its color integrity and you can see a lot of noise (not attributed to JPEG compression, since the original part of the cardboard has different compression noise, because of different compression algorythms. One from a camera/scanner, the other from an editing program). Also the bottom corners dont look naturally right over the hands holding the sign.
If you look close enough the letters and white around them actually drift away from the cardboard itself, and are floating slightly transparent outside the cardboard. That must be some magical ink, or its vaporizing away.
Also, you can see liberal use of the clone tool as the color patters in the letters, mixed with other colors from around the NY which it was cloned from repeat each other over and over again.
3.) The "W" dirtied to make it look authentic actually shows one of the biggest flaws of the photoshop job, because you can see the sloppy use of the clone tool when you zoom. You can see the clone was pasted over the W as there is a depth difference, and you can see color anomalies in the ink blotch that are typical of cloning two color palettes instead of just black.
Ok, now with that out of the way, lets keep bashing those who dont agree with us 
1) The top and baseline of the 'N' are misaligned relative to each other (they aren't parallel). The 'N' and the 'Y' also have misaligned diagonal tilts relative to each other. Therefore the ® mark being out of line seems fairly consistent. All in all it suggest either
a) - the sign is bowing (which it seems to be) or
b) the Top part is hand painted too - maybe badly stenciled from a photocopy? Or Printed from a photo of a T shirt? or
c) both of the above.
The depth issue looks to me like JPEG artifacts which are consistent with those on all the other letters.
2)"Digitally extended cardboard" weird colour patches = initial pic taken with cheapo digital camera then JPEGed to hell and back. Basically that's a express route to artifact city. See weird colours also round the heart, on the building wall, on the guy with the sign's fingers and other unrelated areas. The extra noise is from the extra amount of text in the lower part. There's the same amount of noise around the top part's text, but there's only 2 characters - so more white space. JPEG basically makes stuff into big blocks when it thinks it can get away with it, and small ones when it can't; so noise levels may vary in different areas of one shot depending on clutter and contrast. Try it yourself and see, or look at a few really JPEGed photos in single channels to heighten the blocky patterns - red and blue are usually best.
The colour weirdness seeps in from both JPEG and digital camera algorithims - JPEG is trying to loose as much data as possible by replacing similar colours in as big an area as it can with a single average colour of that area, and the digital camera is guessing 66% of the data for any picture based on nearby pixels - because the CCD can only capture 33% of what's there (unless the camera's using the lovely but hugely expensive foveon x3 Direct Image Sensor). This often gives white areas near colours a red or greenish tinge - same happens in video - but you can adjust the white balance. For a better look at both JPEG & digital cameras doing their bad things to images, have a look at the pic in single channels - Red or Blue seems best - green is picked up more by the eye, so JPEG seems to go a bit easier on the green channel. You can see this on a lot of the other photos in the rally, especially on the white bits of signs and flags. Try this guy's Palestinian flag:
http://users.lmi.net/zombie/sf_rally_march_20_2004/anti-israel_pro-palestine/117-1730_IMG.JPG3)The one thing about the W that
is interesting is that it looks like a bit of the asterix-like splodge extends onto the guy behind's shirt. Then again it could be a shadow on the shirt or a something on the lens of the camera. However at 72dpi & this sort of lossy JPEG level it's hard to say. The splodge itself may have been pasted over in photoshop hence the colour anomalies - but it may also be smudged poster paint, which also produces colour anomalies. Again at this resolution & JPEG level - Hard to say.
The only good bit you showed is the last bit - but then one could equally assume that a guy who didn't get the top & bottom of N parallel, and splodged paint on his sign, and didn't plan ahea
d
enough to fit all of his slogan on is not the most likely candidate to produce a perfectly straight sign, with no bits missing.
All in all, maybe it's photoshopped, maybe it isn't. I lean towards not, on the available evidence, but it's impossible to say with any real accuracy based solely on the pic - the detail just isn't there.
And I'm one of those dreadful pinko communist atheist anti-american peace protesting types.
