Calling ‘fake’ on viral photo ‘Glitch in iPhone computer photography at wedding shop’.

Wesley Hillard, a self-described “rumor expert,” writes for AppleInsider:

British comedian and actress Tessa Coates was trying on wedding dresses when she snapped a shocking photo, according to her Instagram post. Posted by Petapixel. The photo shows Coates wearing a dress in front of two mirrors, but each of the three versions has a different pose.

One mirror showed her with her arms down, the other mirror showed her hands joined at her waist, and her real self was standing with her left arm at her side. For anyone who doesn’t know better, this may be quite a shocking image.

On the contrary, this image clearly looks fake to anyone who “knows better.” But it’s a viral sensation:

In her Instagram description, Coates claims that “this is a real photo, not a photoshop, not a panorama, and not a live photo,” but I’m willing to say she’s either lying or wrong about how the photo was taken. Doing so seems a little uncomfortable, given that the post was meant to celebrate her engagement, but I don’t buy it. These are three completely different arm positions, not three moments of time separated by fractions of a second – and all three positions in the image are perfectly sharp. iPhone photography does not work in a way that produces this image. I’d be less sure this was fake if there was blurry movement of the arms in the mirrors. You can get Very strange looking photos from the iPhone’s Pano mode, but again, Coates mentioned that this is not a Pano mode photo. (Maybe you can create an image like this using a Google Pixel 8’s Better Capture feature, but this is allegedly from the iPhone, which does not have such a feature. Even with Best Take, this is a feature you can call up manually, using multiple original photos as input. I don “t think so any A phone camera, let alone an iPhone, produces single still images like this.)

in Topic on topicsas many commentators rightly question:

• Tyler Stallman (who hosts a great podcast about photography and video):

  Any iPhone photographer can confirm that this is not an image processing error, and it will never look that way.

• David Emil (Writer/Researcher at MKBHD):

  I really, really don’t think this is the real picture. HDR on phones takes 5 to 7 frames with exposure durations of fractions of a second. The whole process takes like .05 seconds. Even a live image is less than two seconds long.

  Even if the phone thinks they are different people, it won’t sew that way and they won’t have time.

  This is spreading everywhere and driving me crazy.

I challenge anyone who thinks this is legitimate to produce such an image using an iPhone with a single mirror in the scene, let alone two. If I’m wrong, let me know.

Update 1: Claude Zins takes me through my challenge.

Update 2: In sharing a long storyCoates says she went to the Apple Store for an explanation and was told by Roger, the store’s “big wizard” of geniuses, that Apple was doing “beta testing” of a feature like Google’s Best Take. This is not something Apple does, and if it did, it would require it to intentionally install the beta version of iOS.

★ Friday, December 1, 2023