One of the first things I do each morning at work is read up on GIS and GPS news.  I noticed Engadget had a posting about Garmin’s nuvifone being available in white, including a photo of the device.  However, the first comment written said the photo was a fake.  The poster said it was just a negative image.  That seemed plausible.  The original nuvifone was black, and an inversion or negative version of a black nuvifone photo would result in a white nuvifone.

I wanted to see how easy it would be to create a fake photo of a product.  First stop was Garmin’s nuvifone page.  I found a gallery of nuvifone images, including one that matched the positioning of the phone in the Engadget photo.  I then found a screenshot that matched the screen shown on the white nuvifone.  Those gallery images were downloaded to my PC.

I then opened up the whole phone image in GIMP.  I don’t like GIMP, but that’s the only image editing program I have on my work PC.  I ran the inverse colors tool to make the black phone white.  I then created a new layer to go over the phone image and pasted the screenshot into that layer.  I re-sized the screenshot, then rotated it to approximately match the angle of the nuvifone.  Now to distort the screenshot so it would match the perspective of the nuvifone’s screen.  GIMP had a pretty neat perspective tool that let me adjust the screenshot image so its outline matched that of the nuvifone’s screen.

Here’s the final product:

Go ahead and compare it with the one in the Engadget post.  That phone looked a little whiter, and some work was done on the microphone hole on the bottom.  Actually, that microphone hole looks so fake – there’s no depth or texture to it, it looks like someone just used a brush to put a black dot on the bottom with the edge of the dot fading.  You’ll also notice that my screen is a little crooked.  But this took me all of five minutes to make, and I’m not even that familiar with GIMP.  With another five minutes, I would have had an even better and more convincing fake product image.

So now you know why there has been such a rash of fake product images lately, from the iPhone 3G to the nuvifone.  It is so easy to edit images now that any idiot can put a fake product image on their blog and claim to have a top secret spy photo or scoop.

FYI:  I am not the one who sent the original made-up white nuvifone photos to Navigadget.