Why the Morgan Freeman finger painting is probably not fake
There's been a lot of discussion surrounding Kyle Lambert's stunning painting of Morgan Freeman, with many people questioning whether the iPad-painted image was a fake. Lambert claims it is legitimate and released a YouTube video showing how he used Procreate to draw the realistic image. This video has now been viewed more than 8 million times.
That hasn't stopped skeptics like Robert Daigle to take a closer look at the image by overlaying the painting on top of the original photograph. Daigle uses a slider image to show how the two images appear to be identical and concludes that "every line, hair and feature seems to be in the precise place as the original." Daigle adds that this doesn't prove conclusively that the image is fake, but it does raise some questions on how Lambert was able to be so accurate in his reproduction.
How exact is Lambert really, though? We fired up Black Pixel's Kaleidoscope app to see if it could spot any differences between the original photograph and the painted image. Kaleidoscope has an Image Scope tool that's designed just for this purpose -- it'll reveal differences between images that can't be seen with the naked eye.
According to Kaleidoscope, there are only a few pixels that match up precisely, and these are marked with white dots in the image above. Even though we can't detect it with our eyes, most of the painted image is indeed different from the photograph. If the two images were identical, the result from Kaleidoscope would be entirely white as shown below.
James Cuda, co-founder of the award-winning app Procreate and head of Savage Interactive, also chimes in with his support of Lambert. Cuda claims the company reviewed the source file and confirmed that "what we are seeing, is the real deal."
