About Nikolai Zak’s fibroma…

Nikolai clarifies that he purposefully enlarged it in Photoshop

After I described the story of my involvement in the Jeanne Calment investigation, where I wrote that I could not understand how Nikolai could obtain such an enlarged fibroma on the nose of Yvonne Calment by merely changing the contrast of the photo, he provided some clarifications about what he actually meant by “contrasted in Photoshop”. Turns out, what he did was the following: he edited the photo in Photoshop, where he circled what he believed to be a fibroma and then shaded it to purposefully enlarge it. Well, I would never use the word “contrasted” to describe those actions, but let’s write it off to miscommunication.

Let me just recap how the events unfolded for me. Here is the original slide from Nikolai’s November MOIP presentation:

The text in Russian translates as follows:

“The fibroma on the nose was found just in two photos (the left photo — enlarged and contrasted in Photoshop, but if you look closely, you can make out [the fibroma] in the source photo)”

How did I interpret this text? That Nikolai enlarged the original photo and changed its contrast, and then the fibroma became much more visible. However, when I tried to replicate these steps, I failed to arrive to the same result:

To my eye, the purported “fibroma” actually shrunk under higher contrast. Moreover, in the same November presentation, Nikolai had a slide with a higher quality scan of the same photo, in which I could not see any trace of a fibroma:

Here are the close-ups from the two slides side by side:

So on November 19, I told Nikolai that I don’t see any fibromas and asked him to send me a higher quality scan of the photo. He did, and after looking at it, I was only strengthened in my thinking that there was no fibroma. By the way, a later photo of Yvonne (originally presented as Jeanne Calment on the cover of a 1995 issue of Figaro) confirmed my hypothesis that what Nikolai mistook for a fibroma was actually a low-hanging columella:

Ultimately, I left the fibroma out of my December 10 articles, despite initially thinking that it was one of the strongest pieces of evidence in favor of the identity switch. However, Nikolai did not heed my comments and went ahead with putting the photoshopped photo in his December 19 preprint:

“In addition, one can see a little fibroma on the nose of young Yvonne. A similar fibroma can be seen in one of the photos of the old Calment (Fig. 4B).”

Here is that “contrasted with Photoshop” explanation again but without the “enlarged” part. So when I recently asked Nikolai to clarify what exact steps he had taken in Photoshop to arrive at the photo in panel B above, he explained what I wrote in the opening paragraph — that he actually edited the photo and enlarged the fibroma:

Well, as I said, I would have used different words to describe this methodology, but to each his own. Also, I would not have written this post if Nikolai himself did not insist that I clarify these aspects about the fibroma here on Medium.