Breaking! Chuck C. Johnson Conclusively Proves He’s Totally Clueless About Digital Imagery
This one will go down in the annals of Chuck C. Johnson’s very worst failures, an utterly ludicrous and flat out stupid post titled: BREAKING: We Can Conclusively Prove That #PrinceAndrew Underaged Prostitute Photo Is Fake - GotNews.
Chuck has gotten it in his thick head that a picture of Prince Andrew with “underaged prostitute Virginia Roberts” is a fake, and he’s calling on a real expert to help him prove it: @FlippingOffCat, a random Twitter account with one follower, whose timeline consists mostly of pictures of people … flipping off cats. Yes, really. That’s who Chuck is referring to as “our analyst.”
Gotnews can conclusively prove that the photo of Prince Andrew with Virginia Roberts, the alleged underaged prostitute is a forgery.
The photo [below] is said to date from 2001 when Roberts was underaged and in London was provided to the Daily Mail by Roberts in 2011.
We consulted with experts in photography and analyses performed using the computer program, Image-Pro Plus by MediaCybernetics.
The key to investigation is the size of the pixels. You would expect a photograph to have the same pixelation throughout. And yet the sections with Andrew and Virginia have different sized pixels that become clear when you zoom in.
Our analyst writes:
Virginia’s and Andrew’s facial photos were taken using different cameras, different shutters speeds; therefore; at different times. Pixels in the photo of the brunette and Andrew are a better match, yet not exact.
It is 99.8% likely that the photo of Andrew and the brunette [Jeffrey Epstein assistant Ghislaine Maxwell] were taken by the same camera, with the same shutter speed, at the same time.
However, the photo shadows, color gradients, and pixel sizes of Virginia Roberts indicate with 99.9% certainty that her photo could not have been taken with the same camera, shutter speed, or at the same time as the photos of Andrew and the brunette [Maxwell]. Higher resolution settings were used to photograph Andrew and the brunette [Maxwell], and neither match the lower quality resolution settings of Virginia’s photo.
DIFFERENT SIZED PIXELS, folks. If you know anything at all about how digital images are composed, you’re laughing already. By definition, pixels in a digital image are all the same size. That’s how they work. There’s simply no such thing as a JPEG with “different sized pixels.”
Chuck isn’t just wrong here, he’s off in outer space. Did he get taken in by a deliberate fraudster? Could be, because if we examine the “proof” provided to him by @FlippingOffCat, we see what looks very much like a deliberate attempt to deceive. Here’s the comparison showing “different sized pixels:”
(By the way, the image shows the subjects’ right eyes, not the left.)
I knew this was bullshit as soon as I saw it; so I loaded the photo into Photoshop to do my own comparison, and it quickly became obvious what @FlippedOffCats did - he or she grabbed two different sized selections. The one on the right was a smaller selection, so when zoomed in the pixels appear larger.
This can’t have been an accident — you have to try to do something like this. It’s much easier to simply use the same selection area over. Here’s what these two areas look like with a selection of 50 x 54 pixels, zoomed in 1000%.
The pixels are exactly the same size, because they have to be. That’s how pixels work.
It’s hard to overstate how massive the fail is in Chuck’s post. He looks like a complete ignoramus here.
I hate to even give his ridiculous theory the credit of arguing about it, because he’s literally the only person in the world who thinks this photo is fake (well, and any wingnuts he managed to convince with his post), but there’s no way to prove conclusively either way. The photo is from 2001, was obviously taken with a film camera (not digital), and has probably been scanned, copied, resampled, tweaked, cropped, color-adjusted, and who knows what else many times in those 14 years. The image is so degraded it’s pointless to try to prove anything from it by zooming in and “analyzing” the pixels.
The only real question is whether Chuck C. Johnson fell for a scam, or whether he’s pushing yet another lie knowingly, on purpose.