An image posted to BP's official website shows workers in the company's Houston crisis centre monitoring a wall of video feeds from remotely operated undersea vehicles. In the unaltered photo (bottom) which has since been released by BP, three of the screens are blank. In the Photoshopped version (top) all the screens are busy. (BP p.l.c.)

Oil giant BP admitted Tuesday to altering an image on its website, exaggerating activity at its oil spill command centre.

An image posted to BP's official site shows workers in the company's Houston crisis centre monitoring a wall of video feeds from remotely operated undersea vehicles.

The centre is monitoring the effects of April's disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

In the unaltered photo, which BP has since released, three of the screens are blank. In the Photoshopped version, all the screens are busy.

Blogger John Aravosis first noticed the Photoshop job Monday, and posted about it on Americablog.com.

“Anyone who has ever used Photoshop knows that this is an incredibly amateur job. I can do far better than this, and I tend to play with Photoshop for fun. We're to believe that a professional photographer did this poor a job, for pay, for a huge corporate client?" he wrote.

International media picked up the story, and BP fessed up.

BP spokesman Robert Wine told QMI Agency there was “no malintent” in altering the image.

“When the photo was taken some of the control centre screens were blank,” said Wine.

“We did copy three of the screen images to the blank screens for the purposes of improving the image from an appearance point of view, not the quality or content of the info it was depicting.”

The original photo has since replaced the Photoshopped one on the company's website.