Fake or Real...you decide

[Rob Lister]

Here's photo that I am clearly posting under fair use.

Fake or Real, you decide.

 

[Foster Zygote]

The repeating circular pattern in the smoke looks hinky to me.

Steven

 

[a_unique_person]

The standards of journalism in general are declining, as staff are cut to boost profits and cut costs.

 

[Rob Lister]

The repeating circular pattern in the smoke looks hinky to me.

Steven

Indeed.

Wanna see something even more kinky?

Check out the second photo here

 

[TragicMonkey]

At the risk of sounding open-minded, I'm going to point out that this sort of thing is impossible to eyeball. The very nature of digital imagery will cause distortion to occur: the image is made up of pixels. Something rounded in nature will be squared up by a computer for display. Try copying that picture, then magnifying it. The apparently identical "swirliness" becomes significantly less identical on a larger view. (And I dimly recall there being some sort of work in the field of psychology on the habit of human beings to see patterns in things that might not have them.)

And finally, you're asking for a judgment of thumbnail of an image that is how many generations off the original? Was this originally taken by a regular camera or a video camera? Digitial, or not? How was that original image put on the internet? Via scanning? Direct download? Through what programs? Any given image online has already been through the electronic equivalent of the old game "Telephone"...and you think you can just look at it and make a sound judgment?

 

[slingblade]

It's not just the smoke, TM. The buidings and other clutter are repeated, too. Definitely shopped. I liked this comment from LGF, though:

"It is really 888, the number of the post-Modern not-anti-Christ hidden in the smoke." --Iron Fist

 

[Earthborn]

Any given image online has already been through the electronic equivalent of the old game "Telephone"...and you think you can just look at it and make a sound judgment?

I think the point is that it actually is the photo published by Reuters itself.

Try copying that picture, then magnifying it. The apparently identical "swirliness" becomes significantly less identical on a larger view.

Here is a nice exercise for you: fire up your favourite photo editing program. I use Photoshop, so yours may work a bit differently.

Make a rectangular selection around the middle "8" in the smoke. Copy it, and paste it on a new layer (Photoshop will probably make a new layer automatically) on top of it. Invert (make negative) this layer. Now set the opacity of this layer to 50%. Because you have a negative and a positive of the same thing shining through, you get an even grey rectangle. By putting a negative on top of a positive, only the differences show up, and now there aren't any so everything is grey. Now move the layer over to the 8 on the left. You will find that with a little effort you can make the negative of the middle 8 fit the left 8 almost perfectly and get an almost perfectly grey rectangle again. There is absolutely now way it would fit that well if these things were not originally the same image. The middle 8 fits almost as well on the right 8.

There is no perfect fit, you will see some static in the grey square if you put them on one of the other 8s, but the differences seem to me to be entirely consistent with typical clone tool behaviour and JPG compression. Reuters has more photos and I'm pretty sure most of those also underwent some serious editing and retouching, but none are so blatantly -- and badly -- photoshopped as that. I'm not even convinced any of the smoke is real, it is pretty easy to fake smoke like that in Photoshop.

 

[Meadmaker]

I'm going with the repeated patterns being an artifact of bad compression/decompression or similar phenomena, as opposed to actual doctoring of the photo to deliberately alter the contents and mislead the viewer. Possibly even some weird refraction phenomenon in the camera lens.

I'm doing that because if it is doctored, it is incredibly, badly, horribly doctored. It looks very much unreal. Moreover, there's no need to fake the photograph. Does anyone doubt that the scene is at least somewhat similar to what's really happening? Does anyone doubt that buildings are really being bombed in Beirut, and that smoke is rising there? Why bother faking it?

So, I have two alternatives. Someone did a horrible job in faking a non newsworthy photograph, or there's some weird digital photography pattern I don't understand that gives rise to apparent repetition in a duplicate, even when there was none in the original scene. I'd like to think that people doctoring photos gave us more credit than that.

 

[peptoabysmal]

The honeycomb pattern makes me think it is Fuji camera digital oversampling.

 

[TheChadd]

I'm quite good with photoshop, while it does look like a possible photoshop... one thing I'd point out is the very top of the image where there are faint lines like a bad print job or something? I've found that often occurs when a picture has been taken too fast with a digital camera and couple possible explain the other duplications in the photo.

I wouldn't be too quick to imply any malice.

 

[coalesce]

I'm quite good with photoshop, while it does look like a possible photoshop... one thing I'd point out is the very top of the image where there are faint lines like a bad print job or something? I've found that often occurs when a picture has been taken too fast with a digital camera and couple possible explain the other duplications in the photo.

I wouldn't be too quick to imply any malice.

I would. I work with Photoshop all day at my job as a retoucher, as well as with my personal Photoshop paintings. This is definitely someone willfully altering the image, and badly at that.

That's the great thing about Photoshop: they give you so much rope to hang yourself with.

Michael

 

[TragicMonkey]

I'm doing that because if it is doctored, it is incredibly, badly, horribly doctored. It looks very much unreal.

Exactly. If someone was going to fake a photograph, it would look more real.

Unless they're either very stupid, or very clever.

 

[TheChadd]

To me it's more the fact that it is so bad that makes me think it's not a willful alteration. Along with the fact that it wouldn't be too hard for him to actually get pictures of the smoke like that.

 

[zenith-nadir]

100% photoshop. The repeating patterns in the smoke are too uniform to be real beyond all doubt.

The person who created the image used the "clone stamp tool" to make the smoke larger than it was originally.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Make a rectangular selection around the middle "8" in the smoke. Copy it, and paste it on a new layer (Photoshop will probably make a new layer automatically) on top of it. Invert (make negative) this layer. Now set the opacity of this layer to 50%. Because you have a negative and a positive of the same thing shining through, you get an even grey rectangle. By putting a negative on top of a positive, only the differences show up, and now there aren't any so everything is grey. Now move the layer over to the 8 on the left. You will find that with a little effort you can make the negative of the middle 8 fit the left 8 almost perfectly and get an almost perfectly grey rectangle again. There is absolutely now way it would fit that well if these things were not originally the same image. The middle 8 fits almost as well on the right 8.

Some of us don't have Photoshop.

There is no perfect fit, you will see some static in the grey square if you put them on one of the other 8s, but the differences seem to me to be entirely consistent with typical clone tool behaviour and JPG compression.

Wait, so you accept the similarities as evidence of fakery, but dismiss the differences as natural computer behavior?

 

[mumchup]

Wait, so you accept the similarities as evidence of fakery, but dismiss the differences as natural computer behavior?

I've been using Photoshop for almost 10 years and I know exactly what he's talking about. The clone stamp tool will copy an area exactly, but in most cases, it's best to use it with a "paintbrush" that has soft edges or to use it at less than 100% opacity. Either of those will cause slight changes in the pixels due to the underlying picture.
That smoke doesn't just look unnatural or touched-up, it looks EXACTLY like what would happen if someone was unskilled with the clone stamp. The effect you can see in the picture is what you have to work to avoid when cloning large areas.
Obviously I wasn't present when the photo was taken so I can't be completely sure that it was altered but I think that it's way more likely than not that it was.

 

[TragicMonkey]

[aside that nobody's probably going to be interested in]

Incidentally, my old philosophy professor would have been greatly amused that anyone would debate the reality of an image. By its nature, an image is explicitly unreal. Consider:

The Thing Itself: there is the smoke (or the sky where there isn't any smoke)
First Interpretation: light from the sun bounces off the smoke
Second Interpretation: the human eye gathers that light
Third Interpretation: the brain interprets the eye's signals
Fourth Interpretation: The human thinks about the information the brain presents
Fifth Interpretation: The human speaks of what he sees

By talking about something seen in an image, we're already at the minimum five interpretations away from the thing itself. And when you add a computer into the mix, you get a lot more steps. There's a mechanical eye for step three, and a series of programs for interpreting the data, and formatting it for display. There are different devices to display the results of those programs, and other programs to store those results and send them to other programs and machines. We're not all using the same monitors, or the same browser, are we? Any more than we're using the same eyes or the same brain cells. We can look at that image all we want, but we're not seeing the same thing. And nobody's seeing what the camera saw, they're seeing whatever everything along the entire chain thinks the camera saw. And in every interpretation, errors creep in.

[/aside]

 

[HeavyAaron]

There do now exist tools developed to determine with a fairly high degree of confidense if an image has been digitally altered. What the algorithm is, I have no clue. Have any of these tools been made publicly availabe that we can use against this picture?

Aaron

 

[Ladewig]

Fake. Even the building under the smoke has been copied.

 

[zenith-nadir]

I've been using Photoshop for almost 10 years and I know exactly what he's talking about. The clone stamp tool will copy an area exactly, but in most cases, it's best to use it with a "paintbrush" that has soft edges or to use it at less than 100% opacity. Either of those will cause slight changes in the pixels due to the underlying picture.

I too have been using Photoshop for years and after a few years anyone who uses Photoshop knows the tell-tale signs of the clone-stamp tool.

Infact anyone who uses Photoshop frequently tries hard not to have the tell-tale signs of the clone-stamp tool when they are using the clone-stamp tool. Why? Specifically because it looks too uniform - too "cloned" if you will - as these plumes of smoke do.