April 25, 2009
Photoshop Forensics
by JeremyWell, I hear Little Green Footballs is at the center of a doctored photo controversy (this time unwittingly). I'm not going to get involved in the main issue at hand, i.e., whether certain European individuals have Nazi sympathies or whether Charles Johnson is being unfair or paranoid. I really don't have any relevant knowledge or insight.
But I'm always intrigued when it comes to Photoshop subterfuge. There are two photos, both of which appear genuine, but one of which must be faked. Here they are with a particular section I have highlighted for analysis:
My first impression was that this is a first rate job of Photoshopping. And I found a number of areas in the photos that offer clues as to which is the fake, but I share with you one that looks suspicious in both photos (until you really zoom in close).
If you notice the boundary between the coat sleeve and the background in the lower picture, it looks suspiciously foggy, or blurry at the edge. So this could have been a sign of manipulation, whereas the same boundary in the upper photo is nice and crisp.
If you've tried to create fake photos (just for fun, I hope) you'll know that it's really difficult to select a person, paste them onto a background, and make it look genuine. It's the border between the two that can suck away hours of your life as you blend, smooth, soften, apply the healing brush, paint single pixels, etc. To do this perfectly, so that it's completely undetectable, is a major project on the order of restoring a painting. It would have to be that important to you. So you can almost always find evidence of that point in the process at which the perpetrator realized that life was too short to spend another 3 hours getting every pixel in place.
The links below are to screen captures of the above selections from each picture. Note that I didn't enlarge the pictures, since that would have caused the pixels to be resampled. Instead, I cropped down to the selections and then zoomed the view up to 1600%, then took screen captures of the zoomed views. I saved the screen captures as .tif images with lossless compression. It would be annoying, if even possible, to paste them into this post, so you can open or download them per the links below:
Exhibit B (cityscape photo)I made some crude arrows to show the points of interest. What I found was that the apparent fog around the boundary in the photo with the cityscape background looks like distortion from jpg compression. In the version with the parade in the background, what you begin to see are examples of bits of color from the background swapped with bits of color from the foreground. And on the lower right, about 5 pixels to the right of my vertical arrow, you can see a section where these blended pixel colors follow a rigid vertical line, which is not typical of jpg distortion, but very typical of human manipulation.
I found a number of other clues, but this was one of the more interesting ones.
So my conclusion is that the photo with the parade in the background is the fake. This makes sense. Disregarding the character or sympathies of the subjects, that particular stiff smiling pose just doesn't seem natural in front of an angry parade of protestors; it looks exactly like a posed publicity shot in front of a pleasant but meaningless backdrop. So if I went into this with prejudice, it went only as deep as that.
"...examples of bits of color from the background swapped with bits of color from the foreground..."
It looked to me like whoever extracted the subjects may have also used a transparency layer.
Good analysis.
Posted by: DJM at April 25, 2009 03:39 PM
Hi DJM,
Thanks. Yeah, this was someone who knows how to use Photoshop. Though I guess that doesn't say much these days. It could be a a 10 year old kid, though one with skills.
Posted by: Jeremy at April 25, 2009 04:08 PM
A note to commenters: the comments script works on this site, but it's buggy. I confess, alas, that I wrote it myself. I know I should fix it, but there has been a major advantage: I have not received any spam messages, as in not ONE in the last 2 years or so.
So please just go ahead and comment and give me a chance to approve it.
Also, if you successfully comment and then refresh the screen to see if it shows up, my stupid script thinks you tried to post with an empty CAPTCHA code, so it shows you an error message. If I had paid myself to write this script I guess I'd have to demand my money back.
Posted by: Jeremy at April 25, 2009 04:14 PM
"...there has been a major advantage: I have not received any spam messages, as in not ONE in the last 2 years or so. ..."
And, how many comments have you received?
;)
(I'm teasing)
Posted by: DJM at April 25, 2009 04:32 PM
"And, how many comments have you received?"
Yeah, well...not many. But it was particularly annoying to get tons of spam comments when you're not getting ANY real ones.
Posted by: Jeremy Brown at April 25, 2009 04:41 PM
I found the largest images of both photos earlier and checked them out. I know from experience that "hair" is a pain in the butt to post on a background and make it look natural. The hair on the parade background has been smoothed.
Also, I found a 1200 px image of the skyline version, but 500 px max image of the parade version. There could be a larger image of the parade somewhere. But my point is it's easier to pass on a fake when you downsize it and it's more likely the larger image is the orignal.
Like you said, it's a brilliant job of photoshopping.
Posted by: jp at April 26, 2009 01:47 AM
Swap links?
http://salibiyyah.blogspot.com
Posted by: DJM at April 26, 2009 07:33 AM
Hey there, DJM. I hope you don't hate me for it, but there is a particular facet of the approach you take on your blog that I disagree with.
The title itself, and the tagline, sets a kind of tone that I think is partly counter-productive. I understand where you're coming from with that sort of thing, because it's infuriating that so many people are so reluctant to condemn Islamofascism out of some misguided sense of 'cultural sensitivity.'
But posts like "The Qur'an is a Selfish Meme" seem to cast a net that goes beyond the fascistic atrocities and intentions of jihadis.
I'm an atheist, personally, so I don't think any religion provides a healthy basis for how to live your life. Or, rather, some of the teachings of various religions offer real wisdom, but every religion has its absurd and offensive dogma that decent people simply filter out, or have the wisdom to not take literally.
So my personal view is that I don't care if anyone embraces Islam, whatever that may mean to them, but if they don't put their innate sense of human decency ahead of any literal dogma that may be enshrined in their religion, then I don't feel any need to be polite or deferential about it.
Anti-Semites have a propensity for using passages the new testament to find rationalizations for hating Jews, or passages in the old testament that they feel justifies their hatred of homosexuals. But, regardless of what these ancient books may or may not say on these topics, I in no way think that a devout Christian must be an anti-Semite or a proponent of violence against homosexuals.
I would agree that there is a much greater problem within Islam of violent fundamentalist dogma being far too prevalent. We haven't seen that in Christianity, for instance, since the Inquisition, I suppose.
My point is that I think it's crucial to avoid saying, or implying, that Islam must be completely abandoned by decent people in order for Islamofascism to be defeated.
I think there is such a thing as a moderate Muslim, someone who cannot be convinced to believe something morally repugnant to him, regardless of any literal scripture to the contrary.
And I think such people deserve respect (and encouragement, and maybe a large basket of fruit). So that's why I think finding catharsis in insulting Allah, for instance, while it's satisfying to know how irritating this is to Islamofascist terrorists, causes collateral damage in terms of pissing off decent people who have no intention of renouncing their own particular interpretation of Islam, because it's part of their identity.
Can you see where I'm coming from, anyway?
I'm not saying, by the way, that I agree with Charles Johnson, because he seems to have crossed a line in accusing people of having neo-Nazi or fascist sympathies. I don't know what's going on with him, but it has been starting to look like a witch hunt.
Summary: I will respectfully decline to put your blog in my blogroll, because I don't feel comfortable endorsing your site as a whole. But I might link to some of your posts from time to time (if I can get off my ass and start blogging again.)
Posted by: Jeremy Brown at April 26, 2009 07:46 PM
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