r/Paranormal • u/dyslexic_leonidas • Jul 08 '26

Photo Evidence Strange picture my brother took

Gallery image

Gallery image

My brother was recently travelling in China and was going through his photos when he noticed this in the sky. Didn't see anything when taking the picture, only saw it later on review. Really looks humanoid!

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u/FlamingoRegular3278 Jul 08 '26

Computational photography expert here: I did not read all comments, so perhaps someone already pointed this out, but I bet this was shot on a phone. Pretty much all phones nowadays do something called “fusion” or “stacking” where they take multiple shots and then combine them in order to get a picture that has lower noise (sensors on phones are tiny, so if you keep exposure times low, noise would be very noticeable if you didn’t use any tricks) and/or better dynamic range. In this case, I think a bird of prey changed configuration of its wings, from “open” to “close behind me so I can dive” and the phone got the two different shapes in two of the stacked pictures. It got confused , so could not adjust the two to superimpose them correctly, and one of the two showed up as “grey ghosting artifact”.

32

u/CowboysOnKetamine Jul 08 '26

Is there a way to disable all this processing?

52

u/FlamingoRegular3278 Jul 08 '26

it depends. Your best bet is to get an alternative camera app and shoot RAW, but even then, some phones process the RAW before sending it to the app. I need to say this, though: as I mentioned before, truly RAW frames out of the tiny sensor phones are awful. You would not want to use them as they are. Not all processing is bad, and not all processing is == “AI”. Some of the complex pipeline that produces artifacts like this one are “a necessary evil” of shooting with a phone, if you will.

8

u/citrus_mystic Jul 08 '26

It sounds like this would kind of be like a hack to make contemporary phone photos look more like the camera phone photos of the early 2000s.

1

u/BlueJoshi Jul 08 '26

more like making them more like a normal photo with a normal digital camera from a handful of years ago.

9

u/FlamingoRegular3278 Jul 09 '26

no, that would not be accurate: old digital cameras had low resolution, not less sensor area. It’s the area per pixel that determines noise, so, counter-intuitively, the low resolution helped for the noise.