another pic

DANNY22XX

ok came across this ,i have my own veiws on it but i would love to hear from here;)

stevenmu

It's very faint to make anything out, even stretching the brightness and contrast a bit. It looks like there's a shadow of something similarly shaped over to the left, I'm wondering if that's connected. Also, was the person holding the camera holding their hands in front of them or is that just a trick of the light?

DANNY22XX

stevenmu wrote: »

It's very faint to make anything out, even stretching the brightness and contrast a bit. It looks like there's a shadow of something similarly shaped over to the left, I'm wondering if that's connected. Also, was the person holding the camera holding their hands in front of them or is that just a trick of the light?

what i came up with was reflection from the lights in witch the camera that can add to the reflection on the shiny floor ,,but an intresting one all the same,im not really up on the photo edit thing but i would love for someone to have a go and see what they come up with

_feedback_

It's a photo of a shed door with a light shining down from above the door.

stevenmu

I don't know much myself, I just drag the sliders around till I see something If you want to give it a go I'd recommend the GNU Image Manipulation Program (more commonly known as the gimp ). It's a very powerfull, and free, image editing app, just open your image in it and right click on it to bring up a menu with al lkinds of filters and options. I mainly just use the ones under the Layer->Colours menu. Some of the ones under the Filter menu can be good too.

I just adjusted brightness and contrast for these two



and



and for this one I inverted the colours aswell

6th

Anything higher res? I'm 10 years in front of Photoshop so if you have something a bit bigger I can have a look?

DANNY22XX

thanks steve good programme ,

5uspect

Adjusting the brightness or contrast in only an exercise in removing information from the image. (Painting or pasting in a picture of something else will add information for example)

When you increase brightness you linearly multiply the 8 bit* integers of the image The darkest tones are changed to higher numbers - The problem is that image noise (a huge problem with the tiny sensors you find in camera phones and point and shoot compact cameras) is also amplified and in the case of this image lots of compression artefacts (which also tends to blur images). If the object of interest is within the background noise and radius of your compression you won't resolve it any better with a brightness correction.

A "curves" correction is non-linear. This allows you to bunch the dark tones together (removing detail, and information, in the darks) and ditto with the highlights. See below:

The top half is a linear progression form 0 to 255 (black to while in 256 steps)
The bottom half has had its contrast increased. If you look closely closely you can just see some banding as the blacks turn to grey. What has happened is that the dark tones have all been made black and the bright tones all white. The mid tones are stretched resulting in banding (or posterisation). More importantly all the detail between the midtones and either end of the dynamic range is removed. Contrast is good for making a picture look more striking but its is not an investigative tool.

Applying such "corrections" CSI style is almost like blurring an image so that you see the shape you would like to see.


*2^8 is 256 which means an image has 256 different shades of colour for each of the red blue and green colour channels. 0 is black and 255 is white for a greyscale image, combinations of RGB will give you almost any colour, 255-0-0 is red and 255-255-0 is yellow

vincenzo1975

the shadow to the left looks like one of those poles and ropes that they use in banks and stuff to rope areas off.

The main ghostly image is interesting, assuming the door at the end is actually open, then it could be a reflection strecting the floor lenght, but the very last light, is that past the door?, if it is, why is there no illumination in the darkness?

Another thing, apart from the last light, all the others are off, the light source seems to be a different light above the other lights, is this some kind of emergency lighting or window.

Riamfada

Any context to the photo Danny?

Zillah

Superficially interesting, but way too low quality to tell anything.

DANNY22XX

Grimes wrote: »

Any context to the photo Danny?

just a photo from another investigator an abondond hotel in england,,its the reflection from the light because he could see it with the naked eye he uses it as a training tool for new investigators

I dont suppose there is a another photo taken of the same place to compare it against ?

Riamfada

Haha investigator training boot camp. What a weird image I have.

Stoner

5uspect wrote: »

The top half is a linear progression form 0 to 255 (black to while in 256 steps)
The bottom half has had its contrast increased. If you look closely closely you can just see some banding as the blacks turn to grey. What has happened is that the dark tones have all been made black and the bright tones all white. The mid tones are stretched resulting in banding (or posterisation). More importantly all the detail between the midtones and either end of the dynamic range is removed. Contrast is good for making a picture look more striking but its is not an investigative tool.

Applying such "corrections" CSI style is almost like blurring an image so that you see the shape you would like to see.


*2^8 is 256 which means an image has 256 different shades of colour for each of the red blue and green colour channels. 0 is black and 255 is white for a greyscale image, combinations of RGB will give you almost any colour, 255-0-0 is red and 255-255-0 is yellow

Kind of like huffman encoding to some degree.
Might be like the way you dont like sound filters Danny.

Still though, even by removing content (and not adding) it's still an interesting photo, I guess no one will ever know, but I'd like it if it was my photo anyway.

DANNY22XX

Stoner wrote: »

Kind of like huffman encoding to some degree.
Might be like the way you dont like sound filters Danny.

Still though, even by removing content (and not adding) it's still an interesting photo, I guess no one will ever know, but I'd like it if it was my photo anyway.

what more filtersOHHHH THE THE HUMANITAAAAYYYY:p

stevenmu

5uspect wrote: »

Adjusting the brightness or contrast in only an exercise in removing information from the image. (Painting or pasting in a picture of something else will add information for example)
...

Great post 5uspect, thanks. You're absolutely correct of course. I would just add though that while it is removing information from a photo, it can be a usefull way to examine a photo for details or items that may otherwise have been missed. Of course because at this point you are examing an aletered photo you need to then refer back to the original to make sure that detail exists there and hasn't just been introduced through processing. But it is usefull when dealing with especially very dark photos where the contrast is low enough that our eyes won't notice a lot of detail (particularly with the cheap LCD monitors most of us non-image-professionals are using these days).

Compression artifacts are a big problem too, and that's a good point that I don't think has been raised here much before. Ideally we really should be using exclusively RAW formats.

5uspect

stevenmu wrote: »

Great post 5uspect, thanks. You're absolutely correct of course. I would just add though that while it is removing information from a photo, it can be a usefull way to examine a photo for details or items that may otherwise have been missed. Of course because at this point you are examing an aletered photo you need to then refer back to the original to make sure that detail exists there and hasn't just been introduced through processing. But it is usefull when dealing with especially very dark photos where the contrast is low enough that our eyes won't notice a lot of detail (particularly with the cheap LCD monitors most of us non-image-professionals are using these days).

Compression artifacts are a big problem too, and that's a good point that I don't think has been raised here much before. Ideally we really should be using exclusively RAW formats.

Indeed it can be a useful tool, remember the faked photographs form the recent Israel Lebanon war?. Removing large chunks of information from the dynamic range of those images showed the sloppy clone marks. That doesn't mean that anything supernatural however could be captured digitally. Can a ghost reflect/emit photons for example?

People are often too willing to jump onto a picture as proof without knowing anything about how a basic ADC works never mind a CCD sensor. There is often too much wishful thinking and faith rather than a cautious skeptical approach. This can only serve to make people interested in the paranormal seem like a bunch of nutters. Thats not to rain on the idea that such things exist but you must remain emotionally detached and objective.

I think a lot of the friction between the paranormalists and the skeptics is simply because of the skeptics desire to exhaust any possible rational or natural explanation and the paranormalists desire to experience something otherworldly. Its a shame really as I'm sure a lot of skepics would love such things to be true, they just want to have the experiments done right.

Unfortunately skeptics often come across as arrogant and smug. and to a certain extent we are :pac:. But this is because there is often such a wall of belief rather than rationality on the other side.

I would recommend the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast to anyone interested in hearing rational scientific responses to a lot of what could be called paranormal issues.

stevenmu

5uspect wrote: »

Can a ghost reflect/emit photons for example?

That's a very good question and something we've mentioned before coming up to investigations when we would discuss what equiptment to use. There is no proof that ghosts will, or even can, be captured on camera. At most there is just some photos which are currently unexplained (most are explained very easily, but there are a very few which are not). It's very possible that even assuming ghosts are real and that people can "see" them, that they would not be captured on camera. It's quite possible that people percieve them through some unknown sense, which is then added to our visual image through some form of processing in our brain. (that last part has actually been demonstrated, in that things percieved through other senses can become part of our visual image, or that things seen are then added to other senses)

I think a lot of the friction between the paranormalists and the skeptics is simply because of the skeptics desire to exhaust any possible rational or natural explanation and the paranormalists desire to experience something otherworldly. Its a shame really as I'm sure a lot of skepics would love such things to be true, they just want to have the experiments done right.

This kind of relates back to what you have mentioned about photography. I'm sure most, if not all, "paranormalists" would like to see proper experimentation done aswell, but there is still a large question mark over how such experimentation could be done. Taking ghosts as a prime example, we do not know if they would or even should show up on photographs. We do not have any solid theories regarding how they work, what energies or particles they would be compsed of that would allow us to reliable detect them. We do not have any tests that we can conduct whereby if the test is successful we can claim to have proven the existence of ghosts, or if the test fails to have proven their non-existence.

Unfortunately skeptics often come across as arrogant and smug. and to a certain extent we are :pac:. But this is because there is often such a wall of belief rather than rationality on the other side.

I think the wall of belief often comes from personal experiences which in all truth are quite possibly false, but equally there is no firm evidence that they are, and so it becomes a matter of choice. Personal experiences, while not of any scientific use, can be very compelling to the person experiencing them, and especially if they occur repeatedly.

For example I was at a play last night and part of the way through it I got a "memory" of the next 20 or 30 seconds worth of dialogue and movement. I knew what the characters were going to do and say. It's quite possible I had seen a clip of it on TV or something, but I don't think so. This happens to me semi-regularly (and generally with things I couldn't possibly have seen on TV or anything like that ) and is the reason I got interested in the paranormal in the first place. I can't prove to you or anyone else that it happens, and there's no reason at all for you to just believe me, but it has happened to me enough that I can't explain it with anything other than a form of precognition. I can't control it or demonstrate it to someone else, but it's happened me enough and shown me things I couldn't possibly have known otherwise, so to me it would be irrational for me not to accept it, if that makes sense.

5uspect

We do not have any tests that we can conduct whereby if the test is successful we can claim to have proven the existence of ghosts, or if the test fails to have proven their non-existence.

Therein lies the problem. For anything to be scientific it must be testable and hence falsifiable. All you can do is continue to try and eliminate all the natural possibilities. Anything that is unexplainable must then be modelled and tested further.

Assuming a ghost is the mind of a dead person then it may have testable behaviours. Unfortunately so too do the testers! Currently science treats the human mind as a neural network based computer. For the possibility of such a network to exist outside the material matter of the brain is another hypothesis that needs to be looked at.

As it stands I don't think there is anything that has stood up to natural explanation (even the kind of deja vu you speak of has seen some interesting psychological research that may be worth a read, I'll for for a paper).

As regards personal experience I agree that they are subjective yet very emotive. As a cold nasty skeptic I have to realise that my brain and senses evolved to help me survive and not to tell me the truth. There is no reason to assume that my perception of the world is accurate, only adequate to help me survive. Its not the nicest idea but that's biology for you; our senses very probably "lie" to us.