In an effort to market the Galaxy A8 Star’s amazing photo retouching abilities, Samsung used a shot portrait, modified it and further passed it off as one allegedly taken by the A8. However, the trouble began  when Serbian photographer Dunja Djudjic noticed someone purchased one of her photos from EyeEm, a service which provides suppliers pictures to Getty Images, a renowned photo reseller. Djudjic was curious as to who the buyer was, so she did a quick reverse search. She discovered her image had been adulterated to within an inch of its life on Samsung’s Malaysian product page.

“My first reaction was to burst out into laughter. Just look at the Photoshop job they did on my face and hair! I’ve always liked my natural hair color (even though it’s turning gray black and white), but I guess the creator of this franken-image prefers reddish tones. Except in the eyes though, where they removed all of the blood vessels,” Djudic stated.

“Whoever created this image, they also cut me out of the original background and pasted me onto a random photo of a park.,” She continued. “I mean, the original photo was taken at f/2.0 if I remember well, and they needed the “before” and “after” – a photo with a sharp background, and another one where the almighty “portrait mode” blurred it out. So Samsung’s Photoshop master resolved it by using a different background.”

This moves comes after Huawei decided to pull a similar stunt with a demo photo in August. Djudjic handled the subject well for the most part, adding: Sadly, it’s nothing new that smartphone companies use DSLR photos to fake phone camera’s capabilities. Samsung did it before, so did Huawei. And I believe many more brands do it, we just haven’t found out about it yet.” She continued saying,  “I’m pretty sure that Samsung at least bought my photo legally, even though I haven’t received the confirmation of it. But regardless, this is false advertising.”

Though, to be fair, Samsung did warn us that this would happen. “The contents within the screen are simulated images and are for demonstration purposes only,” is written by the company in the fine print, located at the bottom of the page. On the other hand, Djudjic lucked out with a paycheck from Samsung for her photo.

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