An 80-year-old grandmother and her large crocheted cat

Here are three photographs of an 80-year-old grandma and her extra-large crocheted cat! The credit for the unusual images is the Facebook page: Feedy. They look incredibly real and a lot of people - perhaps the majority of people - think that they are real, but are they?! They are impressive pictures of cats.

My personal view is that they are excellent examples of photo-editing created with the assistance of artificial intelligence to improve them. It would be exceptional for them to be created solely by human hand.

I say this for 2 reasons. The crochet cats are so big as to be unbelievable. I don't see that is it possible to crochet cats this size without an extraordinary amount of expense, effort and skill. 

It is much easier to make them a normal size and then 'enlarge them' digitally. Think about the circumference of the wool.  Who makes wool that thick. It would have to be like rope.

Secondly in the third photo down the lady's left hand is overly-long, abnormally so. Something went wrong there.

That said and as mentioned these are great images in terms of photo-editing skills. There is no information about the creator on the FB page. I think that the creator is a Chinese man! That's about it and I am probably wrong. He makes strange videos too and they feature Chinese people. That's the basis of my assessment.

Update: I am wrong!! The creator is a woman from Ukraine whose name is LYDIA. I found her story on Instagram. You can read it by clicking on this link which takes you to another of her impressive creations. The crochet is by her and I believe so is the AI photo-editing.

The images have also been posted on Russian and Chinese websites. And on other social media platforms. Everywhere pretty well but it is the first time I've seen them! And I am on the internet daily.

The link to the Facebook page is below:

https://www.facebook.com/feedyrecip

Stunning-looking calico cat but is she real?

 Here she is but is she real? We'll never know. The problem is that there are some very talented photo-editors around nowadays. Although I sense that in this instance the cat is real except that the eyes have been 'doctored' to look more interesting than they really are. I mean the colours are stunning. You just don't get odd-eyes that colour normally. 

As you no doubt know, we do see odd-eye colour in domestic cats with one of the eyes being gold or yellow and the other blue (no melanin pigmentation) but I have a feeling that the colour of these eyes have been enhanced through photo shopping. I don't know. I am forced to guess which is a weakness with current photography.

Almost all the great photographs you see nowadays are photoshopped either subtly or quite extensively. Photography is more like painting nowadays than recording what is in front of the lens. There's nothing inherently wrong with it unless you want to know what the reality is.

Stunning-looking cat but is she real? She is a calico and therefore female.

We also see quite a lot of cats on the Internet with "split-face" colouration. In this instance it would be due to the white-spotting gene or another name for this gene is the piebald gene. This causes a lack of pigmentation in certain areas of the fur and sometimes it's effect produces a sharp line down the middle of the face.

We can tell that this is a calico cat because there is white fur (fur without pigmentation), red or ginger fur and black fur (tricolour). The calico cat is a tortoiseshell-and-white cat. The phrase "calico cat" comes from America. Some people don't like it! They prefer the original description.

And as you also no doubt know, nearly all calico cats are female because that is the way the genetics work. The genes are sex-linked. And in the rare cases that there are male calico cats they are feminised males, somewhere between male and female without being hermaphrodites. They are sterile and they don't show any real interest in meeting with females (asexual).

Photo of 'conjoined cats' wins prize but is it photoshopped?

This is a photograph taken in Japan by Kenichi Morinaga of one white cat and one ginger tabby cat who appear to be "conjoined". They are sitting on a fence. The photograph won first prize in the 2022 Comedy Pet Photo Awards.

'Conjoined cat' won a photo prize but is it photo-edited? Photo: Kenichi Morinaga.

My immediate reaction when I saw it was to ask if the photograph has been created with photo-editing because it very much looks like it. I just don't think that you can get this appearance by two cats being in close contact with their heads facing away from the camera. Anatomically it is impossible to achieve this, I would say. But it beat the judges! Perhaps they accept photo-edited images?

The news media say that the "cats are pressing their necks together to give the appearance of being conjoined". It just doesn't look right to me. And I know how to photo-edit photographs and it would not be that difficult to photo edit this image as follows.

How he did it using photo-editing

One of these cats was sitting on the fence and the photographer acquired another cat from the Internet that was in a configuration ideal to place it on the fence when the background was removed. The photographer then removed the heads of the cats and placed the two cats together. He made sure that the connecting point was roughed up a little bit so that it looks more natural.

How he'll spend the money

The prize was £2,000 plus a £5,000 donation to an animal charity of his choice.

Morinaga said that he likes to spend time travelling around Japan's islands to photograph street cats.

The photographer has a fascination for the antics of cats. He said: "When I returned to Japan, I continued to seek them out, they really cheer me up, especially after the last two years of the pandemic. They are so funny, even when they are doing something serious."

He is going to use the prize money to fund more photo trips around Japan. He said: "I would like to continue photographing many cats and bring many more smiles to people's faces. Through funny photos I hope that the world will one day become a kinder one, where cats, dogs and other animals are not abandoned or mistreated."