Is this a ginune ufo pic?

Never the less, I think it is a bird. Its just folish to speculate on a picture like this. If I where to say anything on this picture, it is clear that it is a bird, maybe a seagull. You can see the one wing reflekt the light from the sun. But thats MHO!

Btw: the more you compress the image with JPEG, the more squared it will become. If the image was compressed to none, it wouldnt have this squared areas.

This is allso a nice opportunity to debunk mikesinghs thread "Alien citys on mars" www.abovetopsecret.com...

Its the same principle with the JPEG artifacs/compression.

I made a little sample just to show you how it is.





The lines that mikesingh wants to be citys / structures .. whatever, is simply a JPEG compression result. You only have to rotate the image and add som contrast to see it.

End of story..

Mr. J,

I think that you might've just inadvertently provided some information which actually supports the position that the photo originally posted by stang56k has been manipulated by a human.

My reason for thinking that is because my avatar photo was in fact heavily manipulated. I had to rotate it and then shrink it in order to get it to meet the ATS file size requirements for an avatar photo.

The original photo (in jpeg format) is 104K and 640x480 in size and it exhibits none of the pixelization which exists in the version which I have used for my avatar photo.

If you'd like, I'd be glad to email you a copy of the original.

Thanks.

reply to post by Noscitare


You just dont understand what we are talking about .. It has NOTHING to do with rotating and scaling .. we where talking about "cut and paste"..

reply to post by tep200377

Ahhhh....okay. Now I think that I see what you're saying.

Now another question: since the pixelization which is present in the avatar version of my photo does not exist in the original version, would we be correct in stating that the photo presented by stang56k has been manipulated in some manner which caused the rectangular area of pixelization around the object in question? Or is it possible that the pixelization was created on the camera?

And what are your thoughts on the lack of EXIF data?

Thanks.

NO, It's NOT.

Cut-n-Paste job.

I do a lot of compositing in Photoshop. This looks to be a very amateurish job to me.

Look at the rest of the sky in the image. The tonal graduation is very minimal. The tonal graduation in the “square” around the item in question has a greater tonal graduation to it. If that wasn’t a Cut-n-Paste job, the tonal graduation of the whole sky would match up better.

Next time, the person that did this would want to select the object to copy with the “Lasso” tool. Then, “Feather” the selection by two or three pixels before copying. That would have made the image appear to be a tad more seamless.

I’d be embarrassed if a “hack” job like this slipped out of MY lab.

hikix, mr. jones, and tep200377 are probably right. It looks like a classic "blocking artifact" or "compression artifact" to me caused by lossy compression.

The tell-tale sign is the number of pixels in the artifact -- exactly 16x16 pixels. Lossy compression software will assess to picture in 8x8-pixel blocks (this is very important). You can see these blocks, even in the blue sky surrounding the object in question. The artifacts around the object is made up of 4 of these 8x8-pixel blocks (making the whole artifact arond the object 16x16 pixels)

This artifact occurs because the compression software tries to "average out" the colors of pixels in 8x8 blocks. the pixels of the sky nearer the object will take some of the color of the object and some of the color of the sky. The closer the pixel to the object the more likely the pixel will be like the color of the object. The further away, the more likely the pixel will be sky blue, but some of the pixels of the sky will be 'contaminated' by the color of the object...in 8x8-pixel blocks.

BUT HERE'S THE KICKER...since the compression software assesses each 8x8 block SEPERATELY, the compression software's evaluation of the part of the sky not included in those four 8x8 blocks will ignore the color of the object and only evaluate the blue sky when deciding what color the pixel will be. Thus you WILL have a very sharp and noticeable transition between the blocking artifact around the object, and the blocking in the clean blue of the sky. The sky still has 8x8 blocking artifacts, just like the object, but being that the blue sky color is much more consistent than the varied color of the object, the blue color in each 8x8 block is consistent pixel to pixel.

The compression artifact in this photo is totally what would be expected given the scene -- small object in a clear blue sky. This is a classic example of blocking/compression artifacts.

HAVING SAID ALL OF THAT...I think this is simply a bird -- flying left to right -- with its wings up, getting ready for the downstroke. The darker part on the bottom is the bird's belly. The lighter parts near the top of the object are the lighter feathers on the underside of the wing (many birds are light-colored under the wings.)

EDIT: corrected formatting

...and 'hlesterjerome' --

I'm not doubting your knowledge of photoshop, but this isn't necessarily a photoshop issue. Maybe you are used to working with raw files, tifs, and lossless compression. Maybe in your work you never come across artifacts due to lossy compression.



[edit on 11/28/2007 by Soylent Green Is People]

[edit on 11/28/2007 by Soylent Green Is People]

Originally posted by Noscitare
I just did a simple blow-up of the object and it pretty clearly looks like a rudimentary cut & paste to me.

It does seem that way, however if you look at other parts of the image there is the same sized block from the jpeg compression -

The surrounding areas of the peaks of the mountain also have the same sized block of artifact. In my opinion, it's more likely the result of compression rather than a cut'n'paste job.

However, there is no exif data, it is too vague to form an opinion reliably, and it may just be a small baloon, plastic bag, or some other mundane object.

An Unidentified Floating Object !

*edit - Gah why can I never get images to upload properly... *

[edit on 28/11/2007 by badw0lf]

Originally posted by hikix
The pixels being around the object is NOT an indication of a cut and paste job. If you zoom a digital image, you will see pixels surrounding all objects. Zoom onto the trees around 400% and you will notice that the trees have pixels surrounding them also, some of the trees pixels are also perfect squares just like the 'ufo'.

My conclusion, yes it is an unidentified flying object since there is no way of telling exactly what it is by the picture. But that doesn't mean aliens are in it.

Foiled again, When will I learn to read more than 2 posts before bothering to load up paintshop.. haha.

Good call, hikix !

Originally posted by kleverone
Acutually they are not "just like the 'ufo'" because the 'ufo' doesn't need to be zoomed 400% to clearly see the pixelation.

The object is in the relatively uniform sky where there is no other contrasting data for it to be blended against, hence it will obviously stick out more than the more undefined merge of the sky and the mountain top. It is a tiny section of difference against a large portion of uniform blue.

In many areas above the mountain top, there is very discernible evidence of the exact same compression artifacts, but these are less noticed simply because there is no hard contrast for the eye to catch onto. If you look at the image closer, you will see that the amount of compression is the exact same within an exact same area.

It's just a very poorly compression image of something in the sky.

[edit on 28/11/2007 by badw0lf]

Originally posted by Noscitare

Well, if this is the case (that JPEG compression (and by extension digital photography in general?)

No. A decent quality camera will use a lossless image format which does not alter the image, hence top quality images of very high definition are very very large. Some NASA images are over a hundred megs in size.

Jpeg is just a format that cheap cameras use (and it's fine for family snaps or piccies of the pooch etc) OR how it was re-compressed to render it down from a >8meg file @ 640x480 resolution, to a mere 19.6kb @ 640x480.

This would also extract the exif data. However, most photo editing software embeds it's own exif data into the saved image, which is not the case here.

It may have been an analogue image and scanned with a cheap scanner? I'm not sure if the OP mentioned how it was rendered onto the computer.

will inherently make a photograph appear to have been manipulated) then I think that the use of digital photography needs to be reconsidered, at least for the use in capturing images of objects which are claimed to be paranormal.

It's absolutely no different that someone taking a very high quality image with a film camera and compressing it with a generic photo manipulation application. The exact same thing would occur - loss of quality, jpeg artifacts and blocky compression.


There is nothing wrong with the digital format of either audio or video. You do realise that a song of about 4 minutes duration in lossless format (Wav File) is about 50Megs in size, while an MP3 file, which uses lossy compression (You lose data) would be roughly 4 to 5Megs in size?

I'd say there is a 99.999999999999% probability it is a bird. Even so it is unidentified. This is my long way of saying; it is a bird.

I should have read the thread first. That photo has not been manipulated. There is nothing strange about it. One pixel covers an area large enough to make birds unrecognizable. If that is a UFO then there may be billions of photos of them. I just call them birds and remove them with the healing brush.

This is an example why if a person is taking serious photos you should buy good equiptment and shoot in the native RAW format without compression. Compression artifacts do not indicate manipulation. The only real question is why so many of these pictures with birds keep ending up posted here. I think the Posters know they are probably birds. The basics of Digital Imaging are not hard to understand. I think people are pretending not to understand on purpose sometimes.

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People


^^^^Listen to this guy, he knows what hes talking about ^^^^

reply to post by hikix


Thanks...but for the sake of full disclosure, I am by no means a "professional".

I just happened to notice that my own personal photos would acquire this artifact after jpeg compression (and it ticked me off!), so I reseached the matter to see why I was getting these artifacts, and to see if there was anything I could do to minimize them.

That's all...just personal experience and a little research in my spare time.

By the way, the answer to my dilema was to leave the photo files as large as possible (i.e. less compression) and buy a bigger hard drive.

That 'orb' is actually something which is used on power lines, I'm not too sure of the purpose (maybe something to due with lightning?).

I was traveling today and noticed red ones which the transmittion wires passed through. These were located in Eastern PA in a very rural area....which is most of PA.

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People

Soylent;

Thank you very much for that explanation. I'm finding that I'm learning quite a bit from this discussion.

How were you able to determine that the rectangle in question is 16x16? I first took a crack at visually counting them in the image but gave up on that as it seemed too problematic where one pixel began and another ended. So, I tried selecting the pixelated rectangle from the photo and saving that to a new file, thinking that the properties info of the new file might (after allowing for some error in the clumsiness of my method) say something close to 16x16. But I came up with an image that is 103x95 pixels.

I have both MS Paint and Serif Photoshop available to me but was unable to find a tool in either that would assist me in counting the pixels.

Any help that you can lend me in fully understanding this will be appreciated.

Thanks.

reply to post by Blaine91555


The reason why people keep posting these mundane images is because there exists no automated filtration process for birds captured on compressed formats!

I'm sorry, I had to answer.

reply to post by Noscitare

Easy. Open up the original, zoom in and count the pixels. Your zoomed in picture on the 1st page is a poor zoom, because it has effectivly softened the pixels making it hard to see them.

Let me make one thing clear when it comes to pixel peeping on photographs:
THE COMPUTER CANNOT AND WILL NOT CREATE ACCURATE INFORMATION THAT IS NOT THERE IN THE ORIGINAL PICTURE

A pixel is a pixel is a pixel. Its one color and one size, period. If you "blow up" images, the program you use is employing various algorithms to create the new pixels... It is creating information that is INACCURATE and that DOESNT EXIST IN THE ORIGINAL.

This is why I utterly DESPISE many attempts to "prove" UFOs and alien citys and whatnot using extremely blown up images. They are a pure fabrication by whatever enlargement algorithm they used.

reply to post by merka

Thanks for that tip, Merka. I probably should've thought of that myself, though. I peeped at the original and the pixels were much more defined and, sure enough, in a 16x16 square.

I'm finding this photoanalysis stuff rather interesting. I wonder what the odds might be of ATS sponsoring some kind of a tutorial on it might be, or at least putting up a forum dedicated to a discussion of it. I know that there is the Jritzman forum, but that seems to be more of a place where you submit a photo for Jritzmans's opinion rather than a DIY discussion.

Thanks again.