Round UFOs and Square Pixelation

Originally posted by lbennie
with any image compression there will be artifacts

That is misleading.

Not every baseball thrown through the air has a box around it. You will have artifacts, true, but they are RARELY such as the ones seen in many of the UFO photos like the ones ignorant_ape is referencing.

Originally posted by HankMcCoy

Originally posted by lbennie
with any image compression there will be artifacts

That is misleading.

Not every baseball thrown through the air has a box around it. You will have artifacts, true, but they are RARELY such as the ones seen in many of the UFO photos like the ones ignorant_ape is referencing.

well in this particular case, the photo ape's refering to has been zoomed and has been contrast enhanced. Both of which greatly exaggerate artifacts.

But i do agree with you, in that they are rarely that bad when unedited

[edit on 13/12/06 by lbennie]

Originally posted by lbennie

But i do agree with you, in that they are rarely that bad when unedited

[edit on 13/12/06 by lbennie]

And on that train of thought, I would like to see the bird pic he posted edited in the same way he did with the original picture of the UFO. That would be interesting indeed.

Originally posted by HankMcCoy

Originally posted by lbennie

But i do agree with you, in that they are rarely that bad when unedited

[edit on 13/12/06 by lbennie]

And on that train of thought, I would like to see the bird pic he posted edited in the same way he did with the original picture of the UFO. That would be interesting indeed.

Yes, indeed it would be. IF they were taken with identical cameras.

did you read UofCinLA's post regarding digital cameras and compression?

the fact that we have no way of telling whether they are taken with the same camera (in my opinion looking at the relative quality of both shots id say its quite obvious theyre not) makes it a pointless exercise.

but anyway here:

You also have to keep in mind that the "UFO" was much further away, the image was zoomed in much more, probably at a lower initial resolution, possible different focus, as well as being contrasted much more against the background than that picture of the bird (that's not even taking into account the compression/data storage technique, camera modes, camera models, etc).

Most pictures with a native resolution of less than 800x600 (hell even up to 1600x1200) zoomed in enough will have artifacts when there is a dark object on a light background. Nature of the compression beast. Particularly when that object is moving and the camera is trying to decide what to focus on.

That being said, yes, many UFO pics are simply paste jobs. But heck, even I can go into PS and work on a picture pixel by pixel and make an object cleanly blend into another better than most of those pictures. Still doesn't mean that mine is any more real than these UFO pictures. Or vice versa.

That's why digital photography will always be ridiculed as weak evidence ... and I have to agree with those doing the ridiculing.

While it was pointed out that the image processing is applied across the whole image, and that is true - that statement also fails to take into account that the whole image is not the same and hence the processing done will do different things in different places.

Most algorithms boost the difference between very light pixels and very dark ones to define an "edge". It's these edges that tend to make things look sharp to us humans. This is what you get with things like unsharp masks - it's upping the contrast between pixel values.

JPEG's are bad because the losses tend to get exagerated in these light/dark areas as each pixel is not delt with individually but in context with it's neighbors. That is why you start to get the dreaded square jaggies around even curved images. A curve in square pixles is simply a series of steps and when the compression happens the steps get binned and voila - nasty big square jaggies....

Don't even get me going again on DOF and blurred bugs and birds (it's a UFO - why yes it is but of living earthly kind) and lens flares/reflections (ooh I found a ghost in my picture - sorry, it's not)....

hmmmmmmmmmm, it amazes you guys still argue over pixels. Doesn't it amaze you that it looks exactly like the mystery object that our Astronauts captured and delayed the shuttle landing.

Seems good camera's or regular camera's UFO/s in movement come up the same.

Excuse me, I mean space baggies.