As if the Oil Spill wasn’t bad enough, now BP has gone and shown us another level of ineptitude: Their complete lack of Photoshop skills.  A series of images has been released by various BP organizations purportedly showing just how hard they’re working on solving the Gulf Oil Crisis.  Sadly, the images are fabrications, and not very good ones.

The first one found was this image of the BP Command Center.

Several people have dissected this image (Gizmodo, Ameriblog) and have very detailed zooms showing how BP, for some unknown reason, decided to replace blank monitors with video footage.  In particular, the guy on the right seems to be staring at some kind of Sun chart?  In reality, he was staring at a screen with nothing but a white line on it, some of which you can still see on either side of his head.

Now, they’ve gone and done it again with this image of their aerial monitoring from helicopters over the gulf.

Click for the fullsize.  Once again, even moreso actually, you can easily see the blurred edges of the water and the oddly placed air traffic control tower in the upper left.  If you look very closely, you can even read the dash instruments which say they are hovering a mere 1 foot off the ground.  Gizmodo breaks it down quite well:

And last, while the helicopter clearly appears to be situated at some height above the boats ahead, the readouts on the dash appear to indicate that the helicopter’s height is 1 foot, and that door and ramp are open and the parking brake engaged, not to mention that the pilot appears to be holding a pre-flight checklist:

Obviously there are bigger fish to fry when it comes to BP. But every time they fabricate an image like this, it undermines whatever little credibility they have left, along with all of the actual documentation of the massive undertaking this has been and will continue to be. It speaks to a company still more concerned with image than reality, in charge of repairing something so terribly broken that we can’t afford to treat it with anything but total candor.

If you find any more, let us know in the comments!