If your process is simply you fiddling interactively with image processing tools, that's not science. This was my master's thesis: the eye-mind-hand effect. Why do engineering designs look different when they're sketched out on paper versus early-stage sketching using a 2D or 3D design software tool? It's not just that software has a particular vocabulary of design elements. It's that an engineer's brain works differently when the eye, mind, and hand are working in a tight feedback loop such as occurs with pencil and paper. That's great for designing things. Turns out it's not so good when you're trying to figure out some objective truth. The feedback becomes a bias. This is why real image analysis isn't often interactive. We use in-house tools based around image manipulation libraries that implement the basic algorithms, but you have to parameterize them programmatically using statistically (not visually) determined parameters. This is the reproducible element. When you do this for legal forensics, you may be using Adobe Photoshop or some other interactive tool, but there's a plugin that's recording everything you do so that someone else can exactly reproduce the analysis steps.
Thus the first problem with this method (and most other anomaly-hunting methods used by conspiracy theorists) is that interactive fiddling engages the eye and brain in the same way that gives you pareidolia in other circumstances. You stop fiddling when you see something you like, even if the phenomenon underlying the fiddling thereby stops at a nonsensical value. You can fiddle with the luminance channel until you think you can see something that was hidden in the dark spots, but you'll also reveal lots of quantization and compression artifacts. If that startles you, you'll just stop there thinking you've found a smoking gun. You aren't thinking about whether the adjustment curve represents a physically plausible scenario.
True Story: Two architects came into the restaurant where I worked, and asked to see where we kept our dumpster. It was in a long internal hallway between us and the drug store next door. They had their blueprints and everything.
One guy asks, "How does sanitation access this hallway?"
I point to the door which opened into the rear of the mall, that gave access to the automatic sliding doors, and the back parking lot.
He asks where the rest of the mall keeps their dumpsters, I tell him there's paddock in the far back lot of the mall.
He say,"Well, we're going to expand the mall, and that back parking lot is going to be developed. You'll have to move your dumpster out there."
I look at him and said, "Why can't we just use the door on the other end of the hallway?"
"What's out there?"
"The front parking lot."
I thought the other architect was going to slap the first one. I pointed out they should have been using that door all along as it's faster for the sanitation guy.
Anyway, as a former conspiracy theorist myself, I am just as guilty of getting fixated on my complex scenarios to the point of ignoring basic facts, and reality. Like when I went to Dealey Plaza, and realized it was an easy shot. This guy is high on his own supply.
