Altered photos

[Jairo]

A HB said that, as the Apollo pictures have been "doctored" to correct color and show more details in shade, they should be suspect and invalid as evidence.

I explained that one couldn't make thousands of fake pictures pass as actual pictures just claiming "changes in color and contrast" as excuse, and that the original photographic films are still available anyway.

Do you have anything to add about the critic and the answer?

Thanks.

[PhantomWolf]

"Pushing" a print isn't doctoring the image.

[furi]

Would that also mean that non Visible spectrum images taken from HST/Probes/Sattelites that are shifted in to visual Range cannot be accepted as evidence?

e.g. X-ray Photography of the Sun shifted into pretty green spectrum

[Kiwi]

Ex-professional photographer here. JayUtah and others will no doubt be able to comment too.

It depends entirely on what is required, whether a photo is required for illustration in a magazine, for display, for private use, for commercial advertising, or for a totally different requirement -- legal or scientific evidence. I've done all of those types. In many cases, clients simply want a "pretty" picture, but for evidentiary purposes a photo might need to be faithful to the original scene, which may also require manipulation.

A very important thing for any darkroom printer to learn in the old days was the art and science of manipulating images -- burning-in, dodging, bleaching, toning, using different-contrast paper, and other techniques.

And it's no different with electronic photography -- the modern versions of the same techiques are all perfectly valid.

I disagree with what the HB said.

In fact, I have long thought that some of the early lunar surface black-and-white prints were quite unacceptable and needed to be reprinted by a far cleaner darkroom worker. I'd guess that they were printed by some clown who smoked in his darkroom, fogging up the enlarger lens. The problem is visible as a dark "glow" to the shadows and an overall muddy look to the prints. Remember, we're talking negatives here, so anything that fogs the enlarger lens will spread the lightest areas of the negative, which are the darkest areas of the print.

Examples in Michael Light's book Full Moon are 60, 63, 68, 70, 74, 76, 81, 84, 85, and 87. Compare those with similar colour photos -- there is a big difference to the detail in the shadows and the sharpness of their edges.

[HeadLikeARock (was postbaguk)]

jairo said:

A HB said that, as the Apollo pictures have been "doctored" to correct color and show more details in shade, they should be suspect and invalid as evidence.

I explained that one couldn't make thousands of fake pictures pass as actual pictures just claiming "changes in color and contrast" as excuse, and that the original photographic films are still available anyway.

Do you have anything to add about the critic and the answer?

Thanks.

Yes. It's a ridiculous argument he/she is putting forward. Sounds to me like a very lazy way to avoid addressing all that evidence.

No photograph is a 100% accurate representation of the scene anyway. All lenses introduce some kind of distortion and chromatic aberration. No film is capable of perfectly reproducing every hue and shade in a scene either. No processing technique is capable of reproducing 100% faithfully what is exposed on the negative. That doesn't mean that a photograph is inherently useless as evidence of something.

I think the HB in question probably doesn't even believe their own argument. Sounds to me like they're yanking your chain.

[JayUtah]

A HB said that, as the Apollo pictures have been "doctored" to correct color and show more details in shade, they should be suspect and invalid as evidence.

Hogwash.

First, any reproduction of a photograph involves changing contrast, detail, and color fidelity. If the person wants to believe that any photo that has had this happen is doctored, then every photograph in the world is so doctored. Exposure correction, for example, is automatic in most lab services for amateur photography.

Second, NASA planned from the start to use darkroom techniques to eke out as much information from the 70mm photography as possible, for example to correct the exposure settings of the astronaut. All photographers rely on the darkroom (digital or otherwise) in that and other ways to produce the final, useful photograph.

Color correction is necessary because dyes shift over time and under various circumstances. That's why many Apollo photographs employ a gnomon with a standard color and value chart. This provides a reference for photographic technicians to produce accurate real-world color from aging photographs.

Clearly this person has no concept of how photography is achieved and seems to be looking for any trumped-up excuse to dismiss the Apollo record so as not to have to deal with it.

[dwight]

Is it my imagination or are the hoax arguments really grasping at straws now?

[JayUtah]

From a certain perspective they were always grasping at straws. But now it seems they're grasping even more desperately at straws that an increasing number of people can see are bogus.

[Bob B.]

dwight said:

Is it my imagination or are the hoax arguments really grasping at straws now?

It appears to me that we’re seeing the latest generation of hoax believers desperately trying to make their own contribution to the hoax theory. They want to be immortalized as the discoverer of the evidence that finally did in NASA once and for all. I have to at least hand it to them for showing a little initiative rather than regurgitating the same old crap. Unfortunately for them, grasping at straws is all that’s left to do.

[Jairo]

bob said:

I have to at least hand it to them for showing a little initiative rather than regurgitating the same old crap.

Actually, some HBs excel in not doing both.

They are copying so mindlessly and caring so little about any coherence at all, that they can't tell anymore the difference between a conspiracist argument and a random error, so the "old crap" started to drift and mutate by itself.

I've seen HBs at orkut.com claiming that the flag shouldn't wave because the absence of gravity, and that there shouldn't be defined footprints because there is no oxygen. What happened with the "wind" and the "water"?!

And those weren't isolated cases. A next wave of drones read that and went to spread the gospel. I've seen this madness a dozen of times by now.

[BertL]

jairo said:

I've seen HBs at orkut.com claiming that the flag shouldn't wave because the absence of gravity

You're kidding.

You must be kidding.

Please tell me you're kidding.

A person cannot seriously be that ignorant.

[dwight]

bertls said:

jairo said:

I've seen HBs at orkut.com claiming that the flag shouldn't wave because the absence of gravity

You're kidding.

You must be kidding.

Please tell me you're kidding.

A person cannot seriously be that ignorant.

Well the best I saw was the argument over at BAUT about how the leaving of the flag up undefinitely on the lunar surface is against US law therefore the landings never took place.

[Fnord Fred]

dwight said:

bertls said:

You're kidding.

You must be kidding.

Please tell me you're kidding.

A person cannot seriously be that ignorant.

Well the best I saw was the argument over at BAUT about how the leaving of the flag up undefinitely on the lunar surface is against US law therefore the landings never took place.

Those rapscallions!

[Jairo]

bertls said:

jairo said:

I've seen HBs at orkut.com claiming that the flag shouldn't wave because the absence of gravity

You're kidding.

You must be kidding.

Please tell me you're kidding.

A person cannot seriously be that ignorant.

Unfortunately, I'm not kidding. The orkut forums are a mess, but they have a search engine: I can bring up the freakshow every time I want. By searching for topics with "bandeira" and "gravidade" (flag and gravity, respectively), I get more than a thousand results (it's the highest the engine can show), in which about half of them are claiming that.

Considering the number of them, I actually hope they be ignorant, rather than insane or evil.

[Jason]

Maybe it's thousands of sock puppets.