Largest Mushroom: Digital Alteration

Hi everybody. I just came across a really interesting skeptical website named Waffles at Noon. There, I found an interesting piece on a step-by-step debunking of a photo that has long circulated on the internet as the largest mushroom in the world.  Thought I’d share it along.

It starts with basic perception, as a red-shirt using binoculars to view a mushroom only twenty-feet. Then, there are signs of a mushroom picture being cropped, pasted and enlarged into this new image. There are unnatural looking edges that change with sharpness, proving that the picture is entirely false.

Boletus photoshopus. Yes, that’s the name creator Tom Bruns gave to this image. Of course, because it was photoshopped.  In response to an email inquiry by Waffles at Noon, Tom Bruns’ lab at Berkeley  wrote:

Pictured in its natural habitat – the digital photo.

This clearly indicated that the natural habitat of the mushroom, was, in fact, a digital photo! If this isn’t funny enough to give you a tummy ache, I wonder what is!

Courtesy of Waffles at Noon.