Progressive Politics

As a frequent Photoshop user I have to agree with the other comment; the beard looks suspiciously like somebody used Smudge to push it out then Blur to hide the smear. It almost looks like the Eraser was used to put a bit of soft transparency on the new edge.

Edit: On further inspection I think they also used the Burn tool on his neck and upper lip to add more shadow.

Edit 2: Burn maybe also used on his hairline. In the upper left there is a curl in the original that has been filled in on the altered.

Here’s my counter. Reproducing line screen images digitally or again in print without shit like moire was a big part of a long career I had once in newspaper graphics and tech.

The image on the left sucks, yes. But even where the best argument is, the right jaw, the left is poorly clipped but sharp.

If that was created in the image, the right could feasible be a shitty reproduction blowing out the black in the beard all over. I argue that the crisp, perhaps poor, crop on the left isn’t apparent on the right and too smooth.

But more importantly, the edge. The face is a reproduction of a print image. They did a good job avoiding moire by preserving the dot pattern in the face instead of blurring the shit out of it, but what they did seem to blur the shit out of is the right side of the right hand beard. I argue the shape of the blurred area on the right isn’t the same beard, and shows shenanigans because there’s no dot pattern - they blurred it.

Edit: I’m kinda high and the moire thing is partly incorrect. It wouldn’t necessarily happen with all this modern tech and they didn’t need to do a good job of it. But that is a former print image and the fuzzy beard I argue was never a print image.