Forensic Photo Analysis

Questions, speculations & updates on the techniques and nature of media fakery
Equinox
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Re: Forensic Photo Analysis

Unread post by Equinox »

woo seems like a good read I may purchase one as well.

Providing the reviews are real it seem like a great read!

http://www.amazon.com/Photo-Fakery-Hist ... ewpoints=1
cheers reel B)
sublimity
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Re: Forensic Photo Analysis

Unread post by sublimity »

reel.deal wrote:Image
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/157488 ... e=&seller=

"From the earliest days of the art form... photography has been fertile ground for fakery...

Photo Fakery is the first book on the history of all types of photographic fakery and manipulation...

hundreds of photographs that were contrived or altered, often succeeding greatly in their fakery by playing a part in history... :ph34r:

benefits and dangers of doctored photos and the many problems raised for the legal profession... :P

with examples never before seen by the general public, Photo Fakery is for anyone who wants to be a savvy media observer."

:D

"Dino Brugioni, formerly one of the CIA's senior photo interpreters..."
sounds fun, might get one...

:)
Did you end up ordering the book? I received it today and thumbed through it quickly to see an example of plane fakery and a building being inserted into a photo. I didn't see anything interesting on American fakery, but maybe i just missed it, being in a hurry.

EDIT: Here's an interesting (obvious) selection:
"..we can tell it is a montage because of its depth of field. When objects both near and far, are in perfect focus it is a good bet that at least two photos were used in its creation"
Image

This image immediately came to mind
Image
;)
nonhocapito
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Re: Forensic Photo Analysis

Unread post by nonhocapito »

sublimity wrote:EDIT: Here's an interesting (obvious) selection:
"..we can tell it is a montage because of its depth of field. When objects both near and far, are in perfect focus it is a good bet that at least two photos were used in its creation"
Image

This image immediately came to mind
Image
;)
Well it is not so simple because the alleged photographer of the ISS is not "near" it: it is imagined as miles away in the soyuz and using a tele. The final result should be compared to that of showing a landscape in focus, with the moon in the sky background also in focus. Those effects do not necessarily require a montage. (Not to imply the ISS picture is real, of course).
sublimity
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Re: Forensic Photo Analysis

Unread post by sublimity »

nonhocapito wrote: Well it is not so simple because the alleged photographer of the ISS is not "near" it: it is imagined as miles away in the soyuz and using a tele. The final result should be compared to that of showing a landscape in focus, with the moon in the sky background also in focus. Those effects do not necessarily require a montage. (Not to imply the ISS picture is real, of course).
You're right. It isn't proof of fakery, I just don't get a true feeling from the image. I guess a better example would be the supposed 9/11 footage, where the helicopter skid and distant scenery are both in perfect focus.
Equinox
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Re: Forensic Photo Analysis

Unread post by Equinox »

The ISS Shot main is fake….
The ISS orbits from 325 km –
The ISS is in focus so I gather the lowest Hyperfocal distance lowest would be, 325 KM.
Check out the fake google earth background” You can see the color of tiny patchwork fields. :lol:
Image





Now compare it with so called "real" ISS footage from 350 KM Lowest orbit of the ISS altitude orbit…

You can see whole cities and countries from that Height.
ImageImage
Image


Not saying any are real of course. B)
reel.deal
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Re: Forensic Photo Analysis

Unread post by reel.deal »

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Last edited by reel.deal on Mon Oct 01, 2012 5:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
nonhocapito
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Re: Forensic Photo Analysis

Unread post by nonhocapito »

Another possibly interesting read on the subject:

Adobe Photoshop Forensics
Sleuths, Truths, and Fauxtography


Image
from http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Photoshop-F ... 1598634054

...this one can be found in electronic format via, er, many channels. :rolleyes: .
hoi.polloi
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Re: Forensic Photo Analysis

Unread post by hoi.polloi »

To the guys-n-gals in this amateur analysis group we have going:

I was wondering if you wouldn't mind taking a look at something I managed to capture last year that I haven't had time to look at. It is meant to depict the "Hudson crash". It is a big poster, as tall as a person. I was trying to figure out a way to scan it at high resolution, but it turns out to be too enormous to scan at once. It's one of those bus stand posters they are shoving at us lately - the ones made by Values.com (see my post about Who is Behind Conservative Ad Campaign Values.com? here: http://cluesforum.info/viewtopic.php?p=2350280#p2350280 )

A tree fell on a bus stand (yes, trees really do fall all the time in the Twin Cities during storms) which - incidentally - is only being used right now to place adverts in it. When they went to change the poster, I asked the worker if I could keep the original poster inside and he rolled it up and gave it to me.

This is not really all that special for any of you, but it is a particularly important victory for me because I have been seeing these ads all over and they are obnoxious as hell. I placed it on the wall of my residence with explanatory captions on digital fakery. (The power of recontextualizing is a great freedom indeed).

They've printed this ridiculous thing at a ridiculous size and it has ridiculous qualities to it that resemble anything but a real camera taking real pictures of real events. And because it is printed at enormous scale, the cryptography software - the kind they are probably using at Rockwell Collins and elsewhere to subtly mask the CGI techniques they use - is plainly visible. And it really isn't explainable as anything else except a deliberate digital information obscurant.

Just in case anyone is willing to look closer, I will post sections of it scanned at ultra-high resolution and you can see for yourself what I mean:
hoi.polloi
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Re: Forensic Photo Analysis

Unread post by hoi.polloi »

Image
A zoom-in of the cockpit section (this is the maximum amount of the poster that fit on the scanner without darkening the edges - like I said, this poster is very large.)

Image
Here is the exit door section scanned at 300dpi.

Image
Here is the cockpit section scanned at 300dpi.

Image
Here is the right of the "plane" section at 300dpi, revealing seemingly intentional smudges and obscuring graphics. The jagged obscuring on the "water" is a crease in the poster. However, careful examination of the "water" in any given area of the large poster generally reveals strange behavior of pixels in vertical lines.

Things I've noticed so far:

Every weakness of the human eye is exploited and enhanced for the purposes of:
1. excusing the terrible image quality.
2. causing people's brains to confuse the digital imagery with direct visual input to the eye.

As such, "dark" areas are filled with randomized warm pixels to simulate the human eye's propensity to obscure dark areas when looking at light areas. Light highlights seem to "glow" with uncanny importance.

The "water" - besides being unlike any water I've ever seen outside of a video game or the 9/11 simulation - seems to be divided into two "surfaces" - the flatter compressed and foreshortened surface in front of the plane and the towering wall-like surface behind the plane. It's almost as if the airplane were a miniature in a green screen movie set, then completely obscured with cryptography software and little people digitally inserted. Although the entire thing could be CGI as well, I just don't know why they would do such a remarkably terrible job of it. I can imagine why.

There are smudges around people where there should be none - implying some kind of additional function to the cryptography that "turns up" or "turns down" general obscuring of any interesting details; and in this case it seems to be turned down. However, I suppose this same technique of software could be used in personal interviews and it could be "turned up" to displace and deform the physiognomy of the speaker and hide their identity.

There seem to be several resolutions working against one another. The airplane is low and the water is high. But there also seems to be some kind of high resolution photoshop filter applied to the entire image. Also, each "large pixel" seems to be made of a mosaic of smaller pixels forming a kind of op-art effect. In addition to that, it scales up as well. The largest pixels are themselves appearing in rounded-square blotches of repeating patterns. Look, for instance, at the cockpit's front and how it is shaded. You can clearly see repeating patterns that should not ever appear in any kind of "compression" or whatever other excuse an apologist could make. Look at any "straight lines" and how they zig-zag along in blocks, as if someone had built the image out of Tetris pieces.

One thing is clear: This is not photography of any sort.

Anything else anyone is noticing?

Here are some more, from more scans I did of the left wing - this initial image is pasted together from two scans:
Image

Image
Where does this inflatable slide actually touch the water in this 300dpi scan? Where is the shadow? What is this thing, actually?

Image
Another 300dpi scan. This time I am focusing on the bizarre appearance of the figures both at their "heads" and their "feet" which seem to be pasted awkwardly over some texture near their "heads" that doesn't appear near their "feet". Their "feet" - and how they are standing - are obscured beyond recognition or recoverable detail.

In case you want the full 300dpi images here they are for download:

http://www.septemberclues.org/images/1 ... 300dpi.bmp
http://www.septemberclues.org/images/1 ... 300dpi.bmp

And please let me know if you'd like me to scan another section of the poster. I can do it up to 400dpi, I think. Just let me know. We now have this ugly thing as a resource for investigating cryptography software. The poster in full (from the disgusting VALUES site, complete with comment section reinforcing the lie, with little but positive spin of course)
Image
simonshack
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Re: Forensic Photo Analysis

Unread post by simonshack »

*

What is THIS exactly supposed to be? A twin-headed woman?

Image

Creepy. I mean: pathetic. :(
Maat
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Re: Forensic Photo Analysis

Unread post by Maat »

hoi.polloi wrote:One thing is clear: This is not photography of any sort.
That's for sure! <_< Maybe they think they're "artists" — reminds me of pointillism, as devised by Georges Seurat in the 1880s:

Image
Large: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... detail.jpg
@ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Seura ... detail.jpg
Georges Seurat - La Parade (1889) - detail showing pointillism technique.

Instead of painting outlines and shapes with brush strokes and areas of colour, pointillism builds up the image from separate coloured dots of paint. From a distance, the dots merge and appear to be areas of shaded tones, but the colours have an extra vibrancy from the juxtaposition of contrasting dots.

Due to the limitations of printing and video displays, the true effect can only really be seen looking at an original painting.
Simon, maybe that's not a "twin-headed woman" but the Hudson's Nessie! :P
icarusinbound
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Re: Image Forensics site still down/moving host?

Unread post by icarusinbound »

A further ELA tool-site now appears to be unavailable...http://www.fotoforensics.com/ has disappeared since Sunday 9 Sep, when they were predicting some scheduled server upgrade.

Not good news...
icarusinbound wrote:Without reaching for tinfoil hats (yet), I notice the Error Level Analysis website http://errorlevelanalysis.com/, run by Image Forensics, is still unavailable. It was unreachable for a while around a week ago, same again a few days back, and now it reports:
Please hang tight whilst we move to a new server!.

Stay tuned for when we relaunch:<enter email address>
Most unfortunate. Any known alternatives?

ps Simon/Hoi, why not offer to host a mirror service? Many users of this site might be willing to subscribe to support this
fbenario
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Re: Image Forensics site still down/moving host?

Unread post by fbenario »

icarusinbound wrote:A further ELA tool-site now appears to be unavailable...http://www.fotoforensics.com/ has disappeared since Sunday 9 Sep, when they were predicting some scheduled server upgrade.
This URL, which to me looks so similar as to be the same thing - http://fotoforensics.com/ - has been working for me all day.
Flabbergasted
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Re: Forensic Photo Analysis

Unread post by Flabbergasted »

nonhocapito wrote:Another possibly interesting read on the subject:

Adobe Photoshop Forensics
Sleuths, Truths, and Fauxtography


Image
from http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Photoshop-F ... 1598634054

...this one can be found in electronic format via, er, many channels. :rolleyes: .
nonhocapito,
I tried to find one of those channels, but no luck so far. Any way you could give me a hand?

Edit: Just had a lucky strike ... no need any longer! :)
icarusinbound
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Re: Forensic Photo Analysis

Unread post by icarusinbound »

May I respectfully submit this as a classic example of a simple false/composite picture:

Image
http://www.veterans-aid.net/wp-content/ ... /pic-6.jpg
Image

The ELA page for it is linked below:

http://www.fotoforensics.com/analysis.p ... 6cbb.13555

The blocky pixellation around in particular his arm, and the fantastic inserted 'Veterans' badge are (in my opinion) just too good not to reference as examples of slop-shoop
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