The following excerpt about digital manipulation is from an interesting article by Don Nicoloff on his analysis of Obama family photographs. His conclusion is that all Obama’s family photographs prior to his election including childhood and High School photos were faked.
The digital age has introduced a gradual progression of technologies, including FAXmachines, copiers, scanners, and computer programs which enable further manipulation of original photographs and documents. Images can be electronically masked, and their content can be edited or compiled at will. Though the technique of photographic manipulation serves a variety of commercially viable purposes, it can also be (and quite often is) used for deception—not just in advertising, motion pictures, and television programs—but also in the mainstream news.
Unlike the standard 'retouching' of photos which removes blemishes from the subject(s) within a photo, digital photography facilitates alteration of the content, in whole or in part, of a photographic event. Photoshop is a computer program with such capabilities. Separate images can be (and are) combined, as a compilation, to give the appearance that an event (the photograph) was captured with one click of a camera's shutter. The viewer assumes the photograph was a real event because it appears to have been taken at a school, an airport, or in a park. Why would anyone fake such an event? The only plausible answer to that question would be, "because the event never occurred in the first place."
Human vision, being analog in nature, compensates for differences in focal points by adjusting the eyes' lenses to focus on a particular object (or objects) being viewed. Traditional photography, equally analog in nature, employs lenses and mirrors to focus, enlarge, or reduce the size or distance of an object, i.e. the subject(s) within a photograph. Light filters placed in front of a camera's lens aid in producing special effects which are automatically transferred to the film within the camera.
On the other hand, computerized photography has certain advantages that allow for a myriad of additional post-production possibilities. Photos can be altered by an infinite combination of special FX, including focal point adjustment, color saturation/removal, hue, contrast, brightness, sharpness, distortion, and the addition/subtraction of original objects, etc.
A few disadvantages found in digital media Digital photography, in the hands of an inexperienced or sloppy manipulator, has its own unique limitations. Advances in computer software have introduced new techniques in photo editing, yet, despite those advances, digitally produced photographs still do not measure up to the sensitivity of a discerning human (analog) eye. Imperfections and manipulations reappear during enlargement (zooming in), due to the enlargement of the pixels themselves.
When digitally enlarged, a computerized photo first begins to distort at the junction(s) of two or more differing colors, including different, adjacent objects. For example, a photo of an airplane with the background of a blue sky will begin to reveal square pixels along the outer edges of the wings, fuselage, tail, cockpit, etc. when enlarged. A white cloud will begin to pixellate at the same time as the airplane. However, if the airplane is inserted (as a composite) into a photo of a blue sky with the aforementioned cloud, the plane will likely pixellate before the cloud, revealing the composite nature of the photo. Pixels appear as square boxes when enlarged in a digital medium. Pixellation can alternately be referred to as 'bitmap distortion' and can be minimized by a technique called 'pixel interpolation', which artificially blends adjacent colors at higher zoom levels. http://web.mac.com/donnicoloff/direc...2C_Part_6.html
DW Description: Chris Langan is known to have the highest IQ in the world, somewhere between 195 and 210. To give you an idea of what this means, the average...