Over the past few days, we’ve all come to learn that the only thing more suspicious than a missing princess is a poorly edited photo of that princess. All the worse if it’s accompanied by a note allegedly written by the MIA monarch herself, saying she casually dabbles in Adobe Photoshop and got lost in the moment.
“Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” Catherine “Kate” Middleton, a.k.a. the Princess of Wales, apparently wrote on social media Monday, personally apologizing for doctoring an official photo of herself with her children. The photo, posted for Mother’s Day in the UK, first drew attention from suspicious royal watchers online, whose doubts were confirmed when the AP issued a “photo kill” for the image, declaring it manipulated. “I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.”
The photo, the apology, the cheeky opening line, the image of Kate fiddling around with layers and smudge tools on Photoshop — it’s enough to be a royal scandal on its own. Posting a photo that news outlets felt the need to kill — an occurrence that’s basically unheard of — felt like such a flub on the royal family’s part that it drew even more attention to the image.
But the thing is that Kate hasn’t been seen in public since reportedly undergoing abdominal surgery in January, and her disappearance from public view has created a massive conspiracy theory with speculations ranging from a more-serious-than-reported medical procedure to rumors about Prince William cheating to speculation about the succession plan and King Charles’s cancer diagnosis.
The photo of Kate and her kids was supposed to squash those rumors, but the poor editing has only drawn more attention to the situation and the idea that the royal family is covering something up.
What exactly is weird about the photo? What is the editing hiding? And aren’t there people who do this…
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