Just to clarify: no robots were involved in photoshopping the image. Regardless of the author's "trusted source's" statement, the image is clearly shopped to remove the score overlays on a video still (as @mrnibbles http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2571979 mentions). The cloned areas of the original image indicate that whatever entity did the shopping had a contextual understanding of the image, which means it was a human (http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2236/5733655921_b28748984b_o.... -> http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5101/5734289061_34f76398e9_b.... -- note that the foreground subjects are not `cloned`).

This was either a quick hack job by a person, or the work of an extremely sophisticated machine vision program.

Figured I wouldn't be the only one to spot this -- seems obvious this is the reasoning. Article got it wrong..

Looks to me like someone has cloned areas to cover the score overlays that were present in the original.

You can see a line in the top right of the manipulated image - http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2236/5733655921_b28748984b_o....

Which matches the position of the score banner shown on the original - http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5101/5734289061_34f76398e9_b....

Unlikely this was done 'accidentally'

Nice find, that makes a lot of sense. There's another line in the top-left, note the blue-jacket guy getting cut off at about the same height.

Huh? Since when does "In no way would we manipulate any photos" equate to having software automatically shuffle people around in the stands?

I bet this software automatically manipulates photos for them every single day.

What they're saying is that it's an accident rather than "yeah, we photoshop our photos to make the crowd look bigger --- standard procedure."

Who cares anyway?

should go through the archives on MLB.com - I bet there are plenty of other examples

Sounds like this could be a seam-carving or patch-match algorithm in play. These are used to resize images without distortion.

A research video called "Image Resizing by Seam Carving"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NcIJXTlugc

Here is how it's done in photoshop:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH0aEp1oDOI (2:45)

It seems someone decided to remove the banner from the video frame. Have a look at the left guys hat, there is a little "v" from where the banner was (in the top red oval).

Edited: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2236/5733655921_b28748984b_o.... Original: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5101/5734289061_34f76398e9_b....

The image cannot be the result of seam-carving because SC does not result in duplicated patches of the region. Moreover, the patching up (as others mentioned, to remove the scores) results in both non-zero offset both horizontally and vertically, which will not happen if you run SC (you'd expect either horizontal or vertical movements).

There's an even better version that works with video: http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/site/seam-video.asp

Hmm I remember seeing that video before. Extremely clever technology.

This is most certainly an artifact of using "content-aware fill" in Photoshop CS5.

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2010/03/caf_in_ps.html

This is clearly photoshopped. No algorithm would do this.

I was half hoping this would be a picture of a Florida Marlins game edited to actually have fans in attendance :-P (I'm from Miami)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/miamism/3655690286/