Reply #36: "Feel-up" is real, "boner" is a maybe

[DrBB]

This sub-thread threw me as I at first thought the claim was about the original photo in this thread. That one would be VERY hard to have faked with Photoshop or anything else--the body positions and the physical contact points between the two people are just too perfect. Of course it's not really in dispute anyway, but the point is worth looking at for purposes of comparison.

Because the boner picture WOULD be easier to fake. It's just that one discrete spot on the image that you'd be working with, and there are Photoshop extensions that can do that kind of stretching. You'd have to do some careful marqueeing and layering to affect his trousers without affecting the girl's leg, though--it wouldn't be all THAT straightforward. Which is why I'm surprised that when I downloaded it and blew it up, I didn't see any evidence of tampering, just the usual jpeg compression effects. I checked light-shadow continuity across the clearly unaffected area to the area in question, and it looks continuous to me. Jpeg compression creates some blockiness at that scale, particularly because web resolution--72ppi--is so low, so there are limits to what you can find. But actually that tends to make things harder for the hoaxer: little lines and bad aliasing that don't show up at hi-res sudden jump into stark relief when you compress the image, especially at the edges where you've done your marqueeing.

I work with this stuff a LOT, professionally, and I actually didn't see the kinds of tell-tales I was looking for here at either the gross or fine-grained level. And I've had no problem debunking other Photoshopped images that people swore were authentic.

I'm not endorsing this pic as genuine: I really doubt its credibility on prima facie grounds (involuntary erections happen, or even not-so-involuntary ones, but come on--he's not fourteen anymore). But I expected to see artifacts of manipulation, and didn't.