Photographer Dunja Djudjic is accusing the world’s largest smartphone maker of using one of his photos and presenting it on his website as a photo taken with his Galaxy A8 Star phone.
In a publication on DIY photography, Djudjic explains how Samsung is using his photos, taken with a digital SLR camera, to show the portrait mode of the Galaxy A8. The photographer made the discovery after realizing that one of his photos uploaded to the EyeEm photo community was sold through his partner, Getty.
Excited to see who bought the photo and find out how they were using it, Djudjic did a reverse image search. It was then that he discovered the image that was being used on the Samsung Malaysia website, presented as a photo taken with the Galaxy A8 Star.
Djudjic notices the bad photo session that is shown in the Samsung version of his image. The biggest difference between the two is the background of the photo, which was completely changed with a new photo. This change was probably due to the fact that Samsung was using the Djudjic image to show the portrait mode of his phone, which can blur the background of a photo. The background of Djudjic’s photo was already out of focus, which left Samsung with no way to show the effect of before and after for portrait mode, which resulted in the image with photoshop.
Worse yet, this is not the first time that Samsung has been dishonest with its customers. Earlier this year, the company used archival photographs in a social media campaign and presented the images as samples of the Galaxy A8 camera.