Caught On Camera (Ghost)

Originally posted by Willard856
I just want to clear something up. A moment ago you said:

She doesnt even know im posting here on ATS she thinks im showing it to a friend.

But then in your original post you said:

I was passed this photgraph today by a friend of mine who knew i liked paranormal stuff and thought she would show me this to which i asked if i could have it for some research here on ATS.

So, did she know it was going to be posted on ATS or not?

Sorry if this sounds like an attack on your integrity, but it does raise the question in my mind as to whether your friend expected you to post it here or not, and whether they are having some fun.

Then maybe i should have worded it like this

"I asked if i could have the picture for myself, (So i could post here on ATS)"

Its not a game of words here you know. I dont go round telling people i post and talk daily on the worlds biggest conspiracy forum and have done for over 2 years so she would have no idea.

I can ask if she can get me anothe picture of the room under the same lighting conditions etc etc. As i said from the start i dont really have much to go on apart from this picture. Make of it what you will its all ive got for now.

I think there are some good discussions on here regarding this however please dont question my integrity i am a honest ATS member and always have been. I have simply posted something that was given to me. As a investigator in my career i know that before i submit a story for other peoples theorys i should first submit every piece of evidence available. Well this is all the evidence i have aswell as the word of my friend. I can ask for more pics and stuff like that and see what we get.

Like I said in my post, I'm sorry if it does sound like I'm attacking your integrity, but your phraseology was significantly different between the two posts. If your friend knows that you post on here, then it leads to a possible motive to have a little fun with you. Happened to another member here called Waynos, who posted a picture that a friend in the military told him was genuine, but it was photoshopped. Led to a very red faced member.

There are a lot of questions over the picture, it is important that we understand the context and background so we can make an informed decision as to the legitmacy or otherwise of the picture. Make and model of the camera is the next big thing for me, because it should be relatively simple to match the pixel count, expected flash impact etc to the picture. And as there was apparently no modification of the image from the phone to the printing, this should be easy enough to do. Again, sorry if you feel afronted by the questions, but as an investigator you must understand why we ask such questions?

i also work in the graphics industry... i do

This is very possible to be done in photoshop, filters or whatever, for this type of thing if ur good you wont need any filters. But it is very possible its real, because, lets all face it, expert or no expert, it looks pretty g d real. The case won't be closed on this until someone admits they faked it (even then people will be doubtful, while others will say they knew it all along).

Thanks the saint for this image, looks frikin spooky man! Would be good to get the file directly from the phone, if possible? Or a higher rez scan, to do that you just need to find the dpi settings a raise them as high as they will go before u scan.

great post!

the image on the phone has been deleted that was the first thing i asked her. I will scan again later on a higher dpi when im finished work

Ok, here's a couple more issues I have found in the past day. Both issues point to a composite PhotoShop job.

One:



In this shot, which is the right side of the photo and the brunette's left arm. We see that the "Ghosts" body color is overlapping the girls arm. Motion blur says the "Ghost" is going from right to left in the picture. Not only does this smear run across the girls arm, but in the opposite direction. The idea of the "Ghost" going over the foreground object of the girls arm is not optically possible if it were truly behind her.

Two:



The more damaging aspect, is the shoulder. Any of you can open the original file and see this, possibly better then I can show here.

I want you to note the dark edge on the girls shirt that is in the circled area's right side. Follow it. Its edge travels up into the "Ghost" neck/under chin area, arcs tightly and comes back down into the girls shirt.

It then travels sharply up, and back into the "ghost". The dark spot on the shirt's shoulder and the ghosts shading share the same edge. The light hitting the girl's shoulder is so directed, there's no way there should be a shadow that dark, in that spot.
And definitely not one that shares the shadow edge with the "ghost". The "ghost" again is overlapping the foreground girl.

I think I'm comfortable at this point, with what data I have been shown, to say this is a photoshop composite. The "ghost" apparently a separate PS layer, laid overtop the original shot and erased from the girls. Only not erased carefully enough, as obviously some spots were missed. In my opinion these areas pointed out here are direct evidence of an overlay composite.

Nothing fancy, and something anyone could do with PS. I hope I've shown them well enough for you all to see. If not, open the original image and get to zooming. I'm 100% positive you'll see what I've detailed here on your own.

In the lower right side of the picture on the brown haired girls shirt......IS THAT A COCKROACH?

The same ''overlapping'' effect could be claimed for points a and b..

Personally I think it could be adequately explained by the joint between her top and her t-shirt.

The artifacting on her arm also occurs elsewhere in the picture where it would have been unnecessary to edit to produce a fake.

Unfortunately the quality/resolution of the printed then scanned image has caused variations in colour and appearances of copy/pasting in other insignificant ares of the image too

I agree that this photo seems photoshopped. The angle of the girl's head would have her hair fall straight down (unless pinned back) to the little black spot indicated.

I'm suspecting that this was a small error left in the image after the hair was cropped back to leave room for the 'ghostly face'.

Originally posted by AGENT_T

The same ''overlapping'' effect could be claimed for points a and b..
Personally I think it could be adequately explained by the joint between her top and her t-shirt.

No, unfortunately they cant be claimed for those spots, as they do not share a common edge with the "ghost". Youre talking about the ribs of a shirt...I'm talking about obvious shared edges and overlaps.

There is also no denying the edge of the shoulder meeting the "ghost" being darker, and following the same edge into the "ghost". The odds of matching shadows and exact edge matches in a natural shot is astronomical.

It should be noted that at no other spot in the photo does any object from the background share an edge with anything on the foreground ladies. Only the "ghost".

Originally posted by masqua

I agree that this photo seems photoshopped. The angle of the girl's head would have her hair fall straight down (unless pinned back) to the little black spot indicated.

I'm suspecting that this was a small error left in the image after the hair was cropped back to leave room for the 'ghostly face'.

Youre absolutely right. Take note of how the sharpness of the girls hair at the ghost is sharper then any other area of the photo. Compare it to the intersect of other light and dark areas.

Why would the chin have to overlap unless he had a growth on his neck??

Seriously, I thing its simple artifacting.It doesn,t even follow the shape of his face accurately enough to be his chin.

It reminds me a little of the guy who shall remain un-named who claimed that the black specks flying around the shuttle lunch were disappearing into the smoke plume,when in fact the unidentified flying turkey vultures were in front of a small cloud about 5km in the foreground of the shuttle launch.The poor resolution was washing out the black specs giving an illusion of travelling behind.

We really could use a higher res scan to disect!!

Originally posted by AGENT_T

Seriously, I thing its simple artifacting.It doesn,t even follow the shape of his face accurately enough to be his chin.

Youre not even seeing my point. I guess I'll have to detail it better. The area of shadow follows exactly off the girl and onto the ghost, then back onto the girl without missing a beat. It's an overlay.

Ok, for those who arent seeing the overlap error. Below is an animated gif to illustrate the edge overlap and consistent area edge that is part of the "ghost" and is overlapping the girl's shoulder edge. This is a consistent edge that runs from the girls shoulder thru to the ghost (with the same exact match edge) and back into the girl (again with same exact match edge) and back up into the "ghost" again...and yeah, again with the same edge matched, pixle to pixel.
Look at the white line, and where it falls, you'll see the overlapping and matching edge. The line is unseeable for 7 seconds so you can see the raw image. Just wait fior the line to jump in and clarify.



Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, the odds of matching pixels on foreground and background objects is again astronomical. It is also a very telling sign of a miss in erasing the "ghost" image off the girl when composited. It appears a hard edged brush setting was used to remove the ghost image off the girl, hence why there is a dark area edge on her shoulder where the ghost is (as to do this correctly would require a brush edge setting equal to that of the original photo's blur level), and possibly using exclusion or pin light layer blending mode on the layer.

Originally posted by jritzmann the odds of matching pixels on foreground and background objects is again astronomical.

I am by no means as talented in the graphics field as you obviously are.But isn,t this what image compression does.

To take the extremes of information(colours) and compress them into a lower memory intense file to save space whilst maintaining a recognisable image

My field of expertise is audio and I know this is the way compression algorithms work in the studio.

I,d love some private lessons if you,re handing them out. woot woot.

No, this is not what image compression does. Pixels dont overlap like that, due to image compression.

What we seem to have is a compressed image(from image shack) of scanned image(through the HP PSC2350) of a printed pic(whatever it was) from a telephone camera(whatever it was) and if it was photoshopped too??...

I would pretty much like to bet that the colours would all start to look alike through that many links in the chain..

Here,s what happened when I did a bucket fill on the questionable area.
.

So doesn,t that mean that a heck of a lot of pixels were the same colour?

I know when I use my canon s50 on high res i barely get two adjoining pixels of the same colour.But this is a cam phone we,re talking about isn,t it ?with so many stages of production before it landed on our ats page too.

edit/ whoops i messed up the page format

[edit on 24-10-2006 by AGENT_T]

I'm really enjoying this thread. I think the original picture is excellent, but the work that jritzmann has put in has been very interesting.

I started a thread on a similar topic about 6 months ago, which has a girl who appears see-thru in a photograph, but also appears in a video too. Shameless plugging, I know, but if people are getting a kick out of this one, perhaps you should have a look.

I'd love jritzmann to put the matter to bed by proving the photograph is the cause of the transparency. The video is in a later post about halfway down the first page. Anyway it can be found here:

Another (as yet) unexplained ghostly girl thread

I shall look forward to theSaint posting at a higher DPi.

[edit on 24-10-2006 by Woland]

I have to agree with 12m8 that the arm section between the girl's arm & torso seems to have much more color that the rest of the anomaly. Isn't this highly suspect? Also to me it appears that the spectre, male or female, has short sleeves. ( I don't know if that has any bearing on anything. )

Great pic thesaint! Thanx for sharing. I have been reading this thread all day. . .

spelling

[edit on 24-10-2006 by 2PacSade]

Thanks.

Im getting highly wound up in case this turns out to be a hoax

Thing is though she is a lovely middle aged woman with no need to put out a hoax. Heck she looked embarrassed showing me it in case i thought she was a crank but as we had breifly mentioned the spirit world in a conversation some 4 months earlier she thought id be interested to see it. If it did turn out to be a hoax then i have even bigger things to work out like "Why would she do this"

currently i still believe the pic to be real

I am now re scanning the pic but not sure what DPI to do at moment im doing 2400 but its taking some time. Maybe this is too strong????

[edit on 24-10-2006 by thesaint]

thesaint,

At his point, I'd just like to mention that No One [aside from the typical guffaw ZOMG detractors] seems to doubt your integrity nor overall intentions, here.

As mentioned, by yourself and others, You have Always seemed Straight-Up with regards to the manner in which you conduct yourself and participate on the boards.

If this Does turn out to be "proven" an altered "image", I can assure that "I" will hold no ill will towards your efforts to bring forth that which was presented to you as an "absolute original". If that ends up being the case, then I feel certain you will certainly take action and admonish those who May have attempted to falsely respresent this.

I would hope others approach and respond to this in the same manner.

Just sayin' Your efforts and overall intentions ring true to me.

$.02