Real or Fake Image?

[9wood]

Study this photo and tell me whether it's been photo-shopped or not.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/15/66/fa/1566faf6b06b4b709e4debbda696baa0.jpg

[SavvySwede]

6 minutes ago, 9wood said:

Study this photo and tell me whether it's been photo-shopped or not.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/15/66/fa/1566faf6b06b4b709e4debbda696baa0.jpg

 

Real. http://www.businessinsider.com/the-best-photos-of-2012-2012-12?op=1 Just do a reverse image search.

[markie]

It was obviously photoshopped. no further comments.

[SavvySwede]

1 hour ago, markie said:

It was obviously photoshopped. no further comments.

Except that it's real.

 

[Pretzel]

2 hours ago, markie said:

It was obviously photoshopped. no further comments.

As @SavvySwede pointed out, it is real (and credited to an Associated Press photographer). 

It's a perspective issue that throws you off. You actually have an elevated view of the green, but the green is slanting away from the camera making it appear as though the camera angle is nearly level with the green. the beach is also much closer than it appears, since there is a steep drop off immediately behind the green (evidenced by the very tips of a tree just barely visible beyond the green), which serves to make the waves look even bigger than they really are since they look much further away than they really are.

That said, those waves are still pretty decently sized. They're just not as massive as the perspective makes them out to be.

The photo was likely taken on this hole from a distance (off to the left from the perspective of this photograph) using some sort of telephoto lens, which would create a small enough field of view to cut out any other references to help put the size of the waves into better perspective.

A different angle of the same hole shows how you might become easily confused if a wave tall enough to cover that rock (behind the pin furthest out into the water) was present. The wave would appear massive, as it does in the original photo, due to a combination of the perspective and limited field of view. Still a large wave, but not quite the tsunami that the original photo appears to depict.

The key takeaway here is that the photo appears to be taken looking horizontally at the wave. From this perceived perspective the wave appears to be massive. The truth is you are looking down from an elevated perspective towards the wave, which is also closer to the camera than it appears to be.

[pganapathy]

Awesome pic. Brilliant photography too

[Fourputt]

10 hours ago, markie said:

It was obviously photoshopped. no further comments.

A telephoto lens compresses perspective and can create some dramatic images.  In this photo, it appears that there is a steep rise between each cross street, but in reality the hill is quite gentle.  My telephoto lens compresses the distances to make it appear more dramatic than it really is.

[Yukari]

Photography is one of my hobbies. It's amazing what you can do with SLR cameras. That's why I don't like taking pictures with my iPhone. 

[CR McDivot]

Photo shopped!

Pixelation of background differs from foreground, clearly visible under magnification.

Copy the image, zoom to 400%. A prominent halo is revealed between the wave layer / Tiger's upper torso, the power line and pole.

The foreground does not have this halo effect as it is one layer.

Editor failed to flatten the image properly... much like the forged PDF of a certain birth certificate...

[rolopolo]

1 hour ago, CR McDivot said:

Photo shopped!

Pixelation of background differs from foreground, clearly visible under magnification.

Copy the image, zoom to 400%. A prominent halo is revealed between the wave layer / Tiger's upper torso, the power line and pole.

The foreground does not have this halo effect as it is one layer.

Editor failed to flatten the image properly... much like the forged PDF of a certain birth certificate...

Here are more photos taken that day, some very dramatic and the waves were rather big on the day. http://m.smh.com.au/photogallery/sport/golf/tiger-woods-huge-waves-and-pebble-beach-20120209-1rnc8.html

Digitally enhancing a photo with whatever technique in photoshop doesnt make it fake imo.

They might have played around with it a bit in terms of colour balance etc, but its highly unlikely that they stuck some fake waves in there or made it bigger somewhat. 

It's just the angle the photo was taken at as another poster mentioned.

[Zeph]

With different lenses, one can also create illusions. This is an example of a 300mm long lens, where the photographer has made the moon appear larger.

[Lihu]

8 hours ago, CR McDivot said:

Photo shopped!

Pixelation of background differs from foreground, clearly visible under magnification.

Copy the image, zoom to 400%. A prominent halo is revealed between the wave layer / Tiger's upper torso, the power line and pole.

The foreground does not have this halo effect as it is one layer.

Editor failed to flatten the image properly... much like the forged PDF of a certain birth certificate...

 

Could have also been photoshopped just for cosmetic reasons rather than content?

[iacas]

9 hours ago, CR McDivot said:

Photo shopped!

It wasn't.

Not to "fake it" in any way. I'm sure it underwent some post-processing. I doubt it's the RAW converted or JPEG straight from the camera hardware.

[CR McDivot]

OK, perhaps "fake" is an overstatement.

Enhanced, post processed, manipulated, photo-shopped - obviously!

On 12/23/2015 at 7:47 PM, 9wood said:

Study this photo and tell me whether it's been photo-shopped or not.

 

[CR McDivot]

6 hours ago, Zeph said:

With different lenses, one can also create illusions. This is an example of a 300mm long lens, where the photographer has made the moon appear larger.

This image appears to have been done optically.

No halo between foreground and moon when zoomed.

This is not to say that a true digital image geek with more sophisticated software could not produce an almost undetectable trick.

Simply that the image questioned by the OP has easily confirmed aberrations that point to manipulation.

[Lihu]

24 minutes ago, CR McDivot said:

This image appears to have been done optically.

No halo between foreground and moon when zoomed.

This is not to say that a true digital image geek with more sophisticated software could not produce an almost undetectable trick.

Simply that the image questioned by the OP has easily confirmed aberrations that point to manipulation.

Thinking about this a little more, JPG format adds little "features" as the one you described. They do a 2D FFT (or cosine transform) on the image and run a Huffman encoder which eliminates a good chunk of the data. This encoding is what helps make the image format more compact, but adds little features like the ones you described to the image.

 

Quote

JPEG compression

JPEG uses a lossy form of compression based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT). This mathematical operation converts each frame/field of the video source from the spatial (2D) domain into the frequency domain (a.k.a. transform domain.) A perceptual model based loosely on the human psychovisual system discards high-frequency information, i.e. sharp transitions in intensity, and color hue. In the transform domain, the process of reducing information is called quantization. In simpler terms, quantization is a method for optimally reducing a large number scale (with different occurrences of each number) into a smaller one, and the transform-domain is a convenient representation of the image because the high-frequency coefficients, which contribute less to the overall picture than other coefficients, are characteristically small-values with high compressibility. The quantized coefficients are then sequenced and losslessly packed into the output bitstream. Nearly all software implementations of JPEG permit user control over the compression-ratio (as well as other optional parameters), allowing the user to trade off picture-quality for smaller file size. In embedded applications (such as miniDV, which uses a similar DCT-compression scheme), the parameters are pre-selected and fixed for the application.

The compression method is usually lossy, meaning that some original image information is lost and cannot be restored, possibly affecting image quality. There is an optional lossless mode defined in the JPEG standard. However, this mode is not widely supported in products.

There is also an interlaced progressive JPEG format, in which data is compressed in multiple passes of progressively higher detail. This is ideal for large images that will be displayed while downloading over a slow connection, allowing a reasonable preview after receiving only a portion of the data. However, support for progressive JPEGs is not universal. When progressive JPEGs are received by programs that do not support them (such as versions of Internet Explorer before Windows 7)^[13] the software displays the image only after it has been completely downloaded.

There are also many medical imaging and traffic systems that create and process 12-bit JPEG images, normally grayscale images. The 12-bit JPEG format has been part of the JPEG specification for some time, but this format is not as widely supported.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG

[Golfingdad]

1 hour ago, CR McDivot said:

OK, perhaps "fake" is an overstatement.

Enhanced, post processed, manipulated, photo-shopped - obviously!

 

The spirit of the ops question was clearly "were these giant waves really behind tiger on this green?" and it's been clearly shown that they were.

Pointing out enhancements is just nitpicking.  "Oh, you removed the red eye?  Then your picture is a fake!" :P

[CR McDivot]

12 minutes ago, Lihu said:

Thinking about this a little more, JPG format adds little "features" as the one you described. They do a 2D FFT (or cosine transform) on the image and run a Huffman encoder which eliminates a good chunk of the data. This encoding is what helps make the image format more compact, but adds little features like the ones you described to the image.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG

Exposing Digital Forgeries Through Chromatic Aberration

Quote

ABSTRACT
Virtually all optical imaging systems introduce a variety of aberrations into an image. Chromatic aberration, for example, results from the failure of an optical system to perfectly focus light of different wavelengths. Lateral chromatic aberration
manifests itself, to a first-order approximation, as an expansion/contraction of color channels with respect to one another. When tampering with an image, this aberration is often disturbed and fails to be consistent across the image. We describe a computational technique for automatically estimating lateral chromatic aberration and show its efficacy in detecting digital tampering.

Compression will introduce artifacts, it is the inconsistency that indicates tampering.