Now You See it ... Now You Don't

I chose the last image, picture 24 (http://www.news.com/2300-1026_3-6033210-24.html?tag=ne.gall.pg), of the man who seems to be smoking a cigarette … only the cigarette has been digitally removed. This seemed like a good choice because many people today who are trying to quit smoking are “editing out” cigarettes from their lives. It seemed appropriate to me that to encourage this positive lifestyle change, images of smokers in popular media could be altered and their cigarettes removed. In the image of discussion, which appears on the cover of the children’s book “Goodnight Moon”, the original picture featured a man holding his smoke in between his fingers. The picture was manipulated by the publisher some years later, and the cigarette removed entirely.

If I had to guess, the cigarette was removed digitally, because the man’s fingers do not appear to have been effected by the editing process. If the manipulation was done in a way less precise than by a computer, I would expect the fingers that once held the cigarette to show some sort of subtle distortion in the pixilation. This said, the quality of the editing job is beautiful, and now the man appears to be merely gesturing with his arm instead of smoking. The reason for such a manipulation is obvious: to keep kids from taking up this harmful habit. Since children often mimic what they see, the removal of the cigarette can be seen as a beneficial alteration, and parents need not worry about this image any longer when their kids choose to read this book.