Ready Player One poster ridiculed for bad Photoshop, turns out to be accurate

If you are a sci-fi geek like me there is a good chance you’ve read Ready Player One. I read it a while back, and while I really loved the general idea, I think that the plot was lacking. This is why I was very excited to hear they are making a movie. Maybe they’ll correct what needs to be corrected.

But, this is not a Sci-Fi blog, it’s a photo blog, so today we explore the “was that a photoshop error” that is the Ready Player One poster.

The movie poster was released about 6 days ago, one day ahead of the trailer. And faster than you can end a game of Pacman, fans started to mock the poster for poor compositing.  Specifically, for giving Tye (the hero) a borderline-freakish long right leg. Judge for yourself:

Not seeing it? here it is again:

Now, the internets were all over this, but is this a case of bad photoshopping? Some analysis shows that this may just be a camera perspective trick.

A lengthy (yet interesting) thread from Captain Disillusion breaks down Tye’s body by perspective and body proportions, to show that the knee (and overall leg length) are just right. (click here for the full breakdown)

Well, what do you know? The half-way point, as dictated by the rules of perspective, lands squarely on his crotch! The part of the body below the crotch, a.k.a. the leg, appears to take the amount of space in the bounding box it's typically supposed to. pic.twitter.com/zNooHFgEXD

— Captain Disillusion (@CDisillusion) December 10, 2017

And another artist actually went through the length of putting a skeleton demo on the photo to show that it’s anatomically correct. (this was sent here, so if you know who to credit, please let me know)

Sometimes, it’s not on the compositing artist, it’s simply on a poor angle selection.