From: Andrew Johnson
Date: 2005-10-04 14:37:04
I was recently revisiting the extremely shaky evidence which has been used to say the London Bombings were committed by 4 Suicide Bombers.On this page:news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/… the BBC report featuring the infamous CCTV photo. It appears to be an astonishing fake – you can even see this on the small picture on this web page (a bit better if you click to enlarge).How on *earth* can only one the railings come IN FRONT of the guy in the White Baseball cap (at the back)? And again, why weren’t a sequence of photos released – 2, 3 or 4?I have made an enlargement here:www.checktheevidence… if that weren’t enough, read the analysis of a Photoshop Expert, on this list:letsroll911.org/ipw-… Isn’t it odd how many people are happy to describe UFO footage as fake, but they do not apply critical analysis to things like this. But, I suppose that’s just the way things are. Question is, can we change things? Hi. Somewhere in this thread someone asked for a photoshop guy to analyse the photo from Luton station. I’m someone that makes a living messing about with images and have airbrushed and cut’n’pasted (digital and ‘analogue’) for years. I also have the advantage of knowing Luton station so I thought I’d get involved. I was convinced that this photo was genuine after a cursory inspection when it came out and I had come here to have a bit of a laugh at all the silliness going on.Unfortunately this is not what I found when I fired up PS and had a really good look. It is a fake and I’m still a bit in shock. I know the hardcore tinfoilers will find that amusing but there you are. Anyway, here’s my analysis.I used the image from the Met site and noted that the jpeg compression was set to 30. At that level compression artefacts will have crept in making the alleged fakery easy to cover up. It also means you can’t get bogged down with chasing every shadow – they may simply be part of the compression process. The original shot appears to come from a low-res digital video system which is in keeping with the story.The lower two figures appear correct to me but overall there seems to be something fishy about the composition. The two at the back may be avoiding the puddle but the body orientation of the person with the white cap somehow seems unlikely if he had just done this. Somehow the turn looks too sharp. Also the fourth figure (nearest the phone box) looks like he may even be walking past the station – either that or he was avoiding the puddle like his ‘colleague’. Do suicide bombers care about their trainers that much? Do radical Muslims even wear such obvious Western footwear?The railing error is really peculiar. The strength of the line is way too much to be attributed to compression artefacts that much I know. It is very typical of a PS mistake too. What really bothers me about the railing though is that it should be a couple of pixels higher in order to meet the corresponding piece to the left of the shot. I can’t work out why this mistake was made – it probably was a rush job. Still for me I would be prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt. It could be a marking on the man’s jacket for instance.However when I looked at ‘railing man’s’ head I realised it was a fake. The head has a black halo around it that has no reason to be there. The give away is the shade of black in the halo – quite unlike any other black anywhere else in the shot. The whole picture has a blue tint that is not present in this black halo. To me this is a smoking gun – it’s so reminiscent of what happens when images are pasted in – and I’ve seen it before many times. Unless the outline of the pasted image is absolutely perfect something like this will always crop up when it’s dropped in. The white baseball cap also has a missing pixel (upper right of the hat) which is very damning. It looks very obvious at 1000% zoom that someone cut into the hat when they were making the outline – the background halo disappears at this point too.I then looked to see if the fourth man’s face had been blurred as I’d seen suggested here. Well, OMG!, it has been blurred. Very nice subtle job, just touching a few pixels but the colour is wrong. There’s a shade of blue that doesn’t match the rest of the picture that seems to have come from a PS brush. Also above his head something has been edited (it slightly breaks up the double yellow line on the road) – something may have been erased here I think. There’s something about this blur that can’t be put down to compression algorithms either – it is a blur with some tinting. Looking at the bus stop post it should have a straight line all the way up. As soon as it comes near the fourth man the line falls apart. It looks like his body is interacting with the post but he’s far behind it. So I now think this fourth guy was pasted in too.The more one studies this image the more you see the inconsistencies. There’s a fair bit of blurring and the railing guy could also be missing a leg. It’s weird what’s happening with phone-box guy’s left foot and the small post too. It’s a strange shot though because when viewed at normal magnification it all looks fairly plausible – disregarding the railing anomaly and the odd composition. Zoom in and it’s a different story.I feel a bit stitched up to be honest.
