Photoshopped F-35 photos?(large photos)

Hello All,

I was sitting around with a friend and I had a large F-35 photo as my wallpaper and he looks at it and says "that's sweet to bad it's a photo shop" and we began to argue over this bit.

The Desktop Wallpaper

www.jsf.mil...

He supports his arguement by pointing out the whitish looking bit on the port ailerons and horizontal stabilizer. It appears on several other photos but I still can't identify what it is. Could sombody please identify what it is and what it's for or if they are indeed photoshoped

Whitish stuff on port side

www.jsf.mil...

Port side with the stuff on the aileron and not the stabilizer

www.jsf.mil...

Port side without

www.jsf.mil...

All of the images are off of the JSF.mil website

Mod Edit: Image Size – Please Review This Link.

Mod Edit: Image Hotlinking – Please Review This Link.





[edit on 29/6/2007 by Mirthful Me]

I don't know whether they're photoshopped but they sure are awesome pics! Look real to me.

First off could a Staff Member please edit those photos or just link to them?

Anyway, tell your friend both photos are not photoshoped and are indeed real. I do not have a definite answer as to why the paint difference (but I will in a few hours) however I assume it's for testing purposes.

EasyE it is against ATS's Terms & Conditions to post images on the forums that are that big. You can link to them however, like this:

Image 1

Image 2

As you can see it screws with the page layout. Also it is not allowed to post images on the forum of any size which are not hosted by you. Those images are hosted on the jsf.mil server, while they should be on Imageshack or Photobucket if you want a resized version of them to be posted.

Those images do not looked photoshopped to me. A job like that would take me quite a few hours to make it looks real, and I don't see why anybody would do that for no discernible reason. I don't think your friend knows what he's talking about as much as he thinks he knows what he's talking about.

It makes me chuckle when people like your friend cry 'photoshop' with no good reason

The photo's are completely genuine and merely show where part of the prototype received some new skin panels for trials, which have not been painted to match the rest of it. Now why would anyone want to photoshop that?

Well as someone who makes his living through photoshop I can tell you right now thats not shopped. There is no tell tale marks that I can see quickly and since the image is so large it gets harder and harder to hides little pixels. I'll see what I can dig up as to why the repaint happened but its not that unusal.

On the image that shows the F-35 from above, what in the world is that inboard of the port vertical stab? Exhaust or intake that has to do with VTOL?

Originally posted by staggerwing
On the image that shows the F-35 from above, what in the world is that inboard of the port vertical stab? Exhaust or intake that has to do with VTOL?

Im assuming your talking about this?



Since I havent seen that piece of equipment on anything other then the test model you can probably be sure its testing equipment of some sort. The F-23 when it did its testbed days and the 22 for that matter had all sorts of bulges on the skin from testing equipment.

I reduced the shadows in the area so that you can see the bulge more clearly just in case people wonder.

[edit on 22/08/06 by Canada_EH]

Thanks Canada_EH. It looks even odder when you can see it clearer. It appears to have some faceting for stealth. It certainly doesn't look very aerodynamic on an otherwise reasonably smooth skin area.

The object in question is the exhaust for the Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) of the F-35. In a nutshell it's a small internal turbine engine that provides power when the aircraft in on the ground and the main engine is shut off. It is also meant to provide power for critical components if the main engine shuts down in flight.

Further Reading

It took me longer than I expected but someone involved with the F-35 program stated that those surfaces were painted with a special white paint for fuel dump testing. The fuel dump port is under the left wing and the paint turns a red color when exposed to fuel.

[edit on 1-7-2007 by WestPoint23]