Is the odd appearance of this owl's head due to an unusual camera angle, or bad photoshopping?

Question

With reference to the below image (on Bing 2015-06-09) something just seems off with the bird's head. Is this a case of bad photo editing or just an unusual angle the bird was photographed from?

Answer 1

I'd like to suggest that the question is good and is about photography (but needs needs more detail.)

Birds can look really strange in flight and knowing this can be of great value if a "looks good to people" photo is wanted.

Also, knowing if a photo has been edited is a valuable aspect of dealing with photos (as opposed to producing them) - although also useful when editing to avoid editing artefacts.

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This beautiful photo is apparently taken by Christoph Bosch, USA and displayed on Bing wallpaper samples here

It appears in a (larger than above) 1920 x 1080 size on many other sites such as here

Christoph has many hundreds of photos - many of birds on hs Alamuy stock photo sire here

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Birds can take on the 'darndest' shapes in flight. In this case all aspects of the profile look quite normal.The left eye area cannot be seen but if it is approximately a mirror image of the right eye area then what is shown seems entirely reasonable.

ie The owl does not appear to have had its frontal shape altered.

Has it been grossly edited overall?
Some or all of colour balance, gamma curves and sharpening have almost certainly been adjusted. A look at the colour intensity histograms for the whole image and various subsets show a series of peaks on relatively smooth curves - these are probably an artefact from a modest level of adjustment - far less than is seen on many images.

Has it been grossly content edited?

My experience has been that by radically altering gamma and contrast levels (and perhaps others to suit) you can usually spot quite subtle changes.

Often the background is discontinuous or obviously patched or cut and pasted.

Image outlines lack very find details and tend to follow straight lines or arcs - larger or smaller depending on what has been used. Even tools which select edges for layering usually do not follow fine contours perfectly.

In this exhanced [tm] crop:

The face's front edges have fine detail (feather edges?) with the background subtly seen through them. This COULD be edited but if so it's utterly masterful.

The background looks smooth and continuous both around the image edge and in all other locations. While the owl image could have been layered onto a continuous background, this seems very unlikely.

There are some additional boundary lines on some edges but this looks likely to be the result of sharpening and compression - probably by the internet processes involved.

Slightly larger version here