Image credit – Dunja Djudjic
Most of us are pretty smart enough to know that you should never 100% trust what you see in marketing materials. This is because marketing materials usually exaggerate what a device, like a smartphone’s camera, can do, and this is usually done in “perfect” settings where the lighting and subject are on point.
This isn’t to say you couldn’t achieve the same results, just that you might need to do a lot more work. However in Samsung’s case, it seems like they’re marketing a feature that you would never be able to replicate. In a post on DIY Photography (via DPreview), photographer Dunja Djudjic revealed how Samsung Malaysia had used a photo taken by her DSLR to use it to market the Galaxy A8 Star’s Portrait Mode.
According to Djudjic, she discovered that someone had bought one of her photos, and for fun she decided to do a reverse image search which ultimately led her to Samsung Malaysia’s website where she spotted that her photo (which also featured her likeness) had been edited and photoshopped and used to show off what the handset’s Portrait Mode could do.
However the problem is the image in question was never captured by the Galaxy A8 Star to begin with, which could be misleading to some. This is actually not the first time a company has been caught trying to pass off professional photos as photos taken by the phone. Earlier this year Huawei had come under fire for doing the same thing. To Samsung’s credit, it is possible that the background image had been captured by the Galaxy A8 Star, and that they simply wanted to use Djudjic’s photo as they felt that it suited the overall look that they were going for, but we’ll have to wait and see what Samsung has to say.