Huawei caused a quite a stir (in a bad way, that is) when it was caught faking selfie photo to promote its Nova 3/3i smartphone. Though, it made the news, you would have thought the industry did learn not to repeat the same mistake twice. Well, nope. It happened again. This time, it was Samsung who pulled off a similar fakery, but using a stock photo by a photographer.

Apparently, Serbia-based photographer Dunja Djudjic was the one raised the red flag because, as it turns out, the subject of the beautiful portrait that was supposedly taken by Samsung Galaxy A8 Star (or implied it was taken by the device) was her. That was really a haha moment. And no, she did not modeled for Samsung Malaysia who posted the image on the official Samsung Malaysia page.

Samsung Faked Portrait Mode With Stock Photo
Dunja Djudjic self-portrait on EyeEm. Credit: Dunja Djudjic/EyeEm.

The story went that Djudjic received notification by photo sharing service EyeEm that one of her photo was licensed by someone. Out of curiosity, she did a reverse image search to check out who could have acquire her self-portrait and then boom! Samsung Malaysia page came up top of the search. Scrolling down the product page, she found herself becoming the subject of Samsung Galaxy A8’s supposed imaging prowess marketing material.

Samsung Faked Portrait Mode With Stock Photo
One of the two images of Dunja Djudjic found on Samsung Malaysia’s Galaxy A8 Star product page. Credit: Samsung Malaysia.

It really is a haha moment that, for the good or bad, it landed her with some attentions. However, Samsung did not use the image as-is. Instead, they pulled off some rather crude photoshop tweaks. From what saw, it looks like Djudjic head shot was cropped, with the background replaced with another similar image.

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Altogether, two images were featured to show the before and after examples of what the phone’s “portrait mode” is capable of (namely, bokeh effect). We do not know what on Earth the marketers over at Samsung were thinking. Whatever the rationale, it is misleading. Well, at least they did paid for the use of the image, right? I think…

The moral of the story is, never believe what ads tell you or what you see in ads. Let the device actual performance speaks for themselves. If you want a device for its photography prowess, make sure you head to the store and give it a test drive to see for yourself. Anyways, before Samsung was called out for its fakery, it did not have disclosure, but apparently, since the unnecessary exposure, it has quietly inserted a disclosure under the photos.

Featured image: screengrab from EyeEm/Samsung Malaysia.

Source: PetaPixel.

Published by Mike

Avid tech enthusiast, gadget lover, marketing critic and most importantly, love to reason and talk.