In an email to The Gateway Pundit, photographer Peter Duke responded to CBS dismissing his now viral video suggesting 60 Minutes used color adjustments to make Steve Bannon “look bad.” Duke argued it’s common for professional video production to include color correction and their 60 Minutes interview with the Breitbart boss was likely no exception.
Credit: Photo by Hugh Slavitt. Used with kind permission.
INBOX: @peterdukephoto responds to CBS calling his Bannon-60 Minutes video "nonsense" pic.twitter.com/GrWJ8qyFQX
— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) September 12, 2017
Duke issued the following statement to The Gateway Pundit:
RE “Nonsense”
All professional video production uses color correction in the editorial process. Minor tweaks can be done in all digital video editing tools, but the majors use Avid Media Composer (see link) or Davinci Resolve to add the final finish to the work.In addition to my experience as a photographer and technologist, I spent 5 years of my career working as creative director at a post-house that produced marketing videos, electronic press kits, for every major studio in Hollywood.Color is a big deal and big productions spend a lot of money and pay a lot of attention to it. In low budget productions, the editor usually does the work, as budgets get bigger, specialists are brought in to do the fine tuning.I don’t know what the review and approval process is at 60 Minutes, but it is assumed that they have one, where things like this are addressed.
Decider.com reached out to CBS for comment regarding allegations they altered Bannon’s appearance. “It’s nonsense,” a representative for 60 Minutes told Decider.
Following Steve Bannon’s highly anticipated interview with Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes Sunday night, professional photographer Peter Duke published a video explainer on how CBS may have used color adjustments to make the Breitbart News boss “look bad” on television.
“It seems like 60 minutes would like you to listen less and look more at Steve Bannon. By subtly tweaking the color of the video, they make him look like a bleary-eyed drunk. I show you how they did it,” writes Duke on the video’s YouTube page.
Peter Duke has photographed Milo Yiannopoulos, Scott Adams and James O’Keefe.
In the video, Duke explains how CBS color adjusted Bannon’s shots to make his eyes and lips red by increasing the level of saturation. This results in curtains that are a brighter orange behind Bannon than they are in Charlie Rose’s shot. Rose’s shot was made “cooler,” to make the host’s make-up more subtle.
Duke then adjusted the interview’s lighting, removing Bannon’s redness and Rose’s “coolness.”
The result is a natural looking Bannon.
As author Ann Coulter pointed out, these types of mainstream media tricks aren’t done on Fox News — hence why conservatives look better on the channel.
https://twitter.com/AnnCoulter/status/907091362562166789?ref_src=twsrc% 5Etfw&ref_url=http% 3A% 2F% 2Fwww.thegatewaypundit.com% 2F2017% 2F09% 2Fwatch-photographer-explains-cbs-used-color-adjustments-make-steve-bannon-look-bad-60-minutes% 2F
Below is a transcript of Peter Duke’s video:
DUKE: I wanted to talk a little bit today about color correction and grading, and how it can be used to make people look better or worse on television. This is a still frame of Steve Bannon from the 60 Minutes interview that’s going to run tonight. And the first things that I noticed was that there were red circles around his eyes and his lips looked cherry red. And I also noticed the curtains in the background looked really orange.
Now I’ve met Steve Bannon and I know what he looks like. He’s Irish and he does kinda have paper skin. But, he doesn’t have pronounced red circles around his eyes. That’s not who he is in real life. So I started comparing the two shots of Charlie Rose and Steve Bannon to see what kind of differences I could find, and it was very interesting. The first thing that you need to take a look at is the coloring saturation. Those drapes in the Breitbart Embassy are actually the same color. Now the light lighting them might be slightly closer or farther away, which accounts for the brightness, but they are the same color. And you can see from these two shots that they are defiantly not the same color.
If you take a look at Charlie Rose’s shirt, it’s about 13 unit of blue from neutral, which means that they’ve graded it into a cooler shot. That does a couple of things. It makes his make-up look less clownish and it also knocks down the contrast a little bit. So, I’m going to do the same thing to Steve. I’m going to make it a little bit bluer and I’m also going to lighten up the shadows a little bit. And Voila, the blood shot eyes are gone.
Now I’m going to do to Charlie what they did to Steve. I’m going to kick up the situation, the red, the orange, and i’m going to increase the contrast. So here are the two shots before and after, before and after. And here’s what the pictures would look like if they were graded similarly. Steve doesn’t have red circles under his eyes, Charlie’s make-up is subtle, can’t really tell he’s got it on, unless you’re looking. And Steve doesn’t look like the monster they want you to think that he is.
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon appeared on 60 Minutes with Charlie Rose and discussed a myriad of topics, from the GOP establishment trying to nullify Trump’s presidency to Hillary Clinton not being as smart as liberals always say she is . . .
“Her very first speech when she came off the beach was nonsense,” Bannon begins to Rose, “and this goes with something I want to address with you: Hillary Clinton’s not very bright.”
Bannon continues to describe the ways in which she failed during the election, and beyond.
“Everybody says she’s so smart, so much smarter than Donald Trump . . . She doesn’t really have a grasp, she doesn’t have a grasp on what’s important and what’s not – and that’s what’s essential in a leader. Donald Trump has a grasp on what’s important and what’s marginalia.”
Rose then pressed Bannon the ethno-nationalist descriptor she pinned to Breitbart and others on the New Right, but Bannon was quick to shut down the impending smear.
Rose asks, “Cause you want no part of ethno-nationalism?”
Bannon replies quickly, “That’s ridiculous on the face of it, it’s absurd . . .”
Bannon: “Not only is it morally wrong, it’s also totally irrelevant. Economic nationalism is what this country was built on, it’s the American system . . .”
