What is it about this albatross photograph that makes it look like it might either be faked or actually a photorealistic drawing (to me at least)?

Question

When I first saw this photo of three albatross, it seemed wrong to me somehow - like the birds were hand-drawn and added to a photo of a background. It doesn't look like an actual photograph, but I can not say what it is exactly that is giving me that feeling, except perhaps mismatches in contrast and focus in different parts of the photo.

It is from Science Magazine's December 5, 2015 This Week in Science's Not enough protection for migrating birds and it is a file photo (see the caption & credit under the photo.

I'm not asking if it is or isn't fake or modified; I'm trying to simply understand what makes it so... not-quite photographic-looking.

It reminds me of the 1950's SciFi movies where one thing is superimposed on another, pre-green screen.

(click for full size)

Vulnerable short-tailed albatross (Phoebastria albatrus) nest in Japan and are responding to protection measures in Japan, Canada and the USA. PHOTO: ©TUI DE ROY/MINDEN PICTURES/CORBIS

This photo can also be found at https://animalsandearth.com/featured/short-tailed-albatross-trio-at-nest-tui-de-roy.html

Answer 1

IMO, the primary cause of the effect is differential lighting. The birds and grass have hard bright frontal light from high right. Whereas the foreground and background appear to have softer/dimmer lighting with less directionality. This can happen naturally; but when the lighting doesn't match it can seem like the images were taken in different places or at different times. Many people will notice this subliminally; and it is one of the major clues that an image has been edited without enough attention to the details.

And the fact that there is not much detail in the birds, where you would kind of expect there to be detail, gives the impression that they could be fake. Especially since there appears to be more detail in the grass and foreground. This is also a characteristic of flat/frontal lighting and monotone colors (e.g. white feathers)... the light fills in all shadows; and without shadows there is no texture/detail visible. The smaller the details (shadows) are, the more likely they are to be filled in.

Answer 2

Late addition
To me, the jury's still out on whether it's fake, but I do come down on the side of 'real, but worked up [too] hard'.
In the photographer's defense, I do get the feeling the guy only got one shot [or batch of shots off an auto-trigger] & the camera got the light wrong. It's borderline over-exposed, losing detail from the lighter areas. I've done that myself often with white bird, dark background, your backdrop looks great, bird is sharp… but little feather detail left. So here, heavy cloud, sun peeks through, auto-exposure goes to hell.

In post from a RAW [idk about other cameras but] Nikon has a 'highlight protect' option that attempts to pull back some detail where it's nearly gone. It's pretty good at it, better than anything else I've tried, but it's not a miracle worker.

Maybe it was the only frame where they were posed, and not back of head, yawning, scratching under wing, crapping on grass, squabbling… that mars many a wildlife shot.

I also think it's slightly back-focussed. It's hard to tell after so much post on it, but I think the birds' breasts are closer than 'sharp', making the white feather issue even harder to try fix.

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It looks like it may have had a bit of HDR done to it, to balance up the lighting. This often produces a bit of a halo around sharp edges where there was a lot of change in the light levels.

It can give a bit of an 'uncanny valley' look to things - in this case it almost looks like studio lighting, which in other circumstances I'd put down to something like Apple's 'portrait mode' which can do that in-camera.

See also: Halo in pictures taken with HDR

Checking a higher res preview from the linked origin, this looks even more like aggressive over-processing more common to a phone. It looks like as well as being HDR'd, it's been aggressively sharpened & de-noised, which gives a very 'plastic' look to things.

An example of this over-sharpen, over-de-noise effect.
First the original - small crop of a photo taken from too far away for the lens/camera to really cope, so it's noisy & not properly sharp.

After massive over-processing

Answer 3

Complementing Steven Kersting´s answer:

The photo looks like a diorama.

Look at the images at this google search

You put some stuffed animals with a printed photograph as a background, then you add some spotlights.

This happens when you add a flash to a photo taken with a natural light background. It is a really cool effect for portraits.

I feel that the photographer used a flash on a really cloudy day. I think the shadows are not parallel.

It can also happen when there are stormy clouds in the background and some clear sky in the front. It is not the case in this image because you can see a few clouds; they are oddly dark.

Assuming both the birds and the clouds are white, and illuminated by the same Sun (not on Tatooine) they should look similar in brightness.

Answer 4

The very sharp edges of the birds that totally lack loose feathers are indeed surprising. But if you go to the site and check the close-ups, you see some lose feathers on the back of the head of the left bird. In fact the answer is on the head of the middle bird, that shows a halo:

... which means that at least some parts of the image have been overly sharpened, while the picture isn't that sharp to begin with (check the plumages).

Answer 5

I am not sure if you are seeing the same as I, but I agree, that the image at at least on a first glance looks odd.

What I believe confuses my brain is that the birds all have a much brighter front (especially front of neck and breast) than the rest of their plumage. That gives the impression that all birds are lit from the front, although they face in different directions and that the light seemingly used to illuminate the birds does not match the direction of the shadows the birds are throwing on the ground.

Answer 6

The birds have "built-in" shading.

I think this is a very important point, and I haven't seen it mentioned yet.

The gradual transition between dark and light feathers can look like it is caused by lighting and not by the natural, ingrained colors of the birds. The shading makes it look like the birds are grouped around a very bright, omnidirectional light source. Of course this light source doesn't exist, which I think makes it hard for our brains to make sense of.

Answer 7

I believe there are two primary causes of the uncanny valley feel:

• The very smooth silhouette of the three birds, which makes it look like their feathers are only textures on smooth surfaces.
• The fairly uniform and bright reflected light on the underside of the birds looks like the "ambient lighting" effect used in real time graphics to inexpensively emulate indirect lighting. In particular, the undersides of the birds are brighter than the shadows cast by the same birds, which is an unusual phenomenon in real life, but less unusual in computer graphics.

Answer 8

Two main reasons

This photograph is taken with a very powerful zoom, if you look closely at both the grass directly in front of the birds and the grass directly behind them, both appear out of focus, highlighting the main figure of the birds. Any photograph of an object in an environment taken with a powerful zoom will make the object appear cut out precisely because of the blur of the surrounding elements.

See Nature at mega zoom at bryanpfeiffer.com

Secondly, the characteristic of the photographed object, in particular both the plumage and the shadow of the grass, form a dark outline, better defining the figure.

Answer 9

To substantiate earlier answers on perception of the true color image, one complement the analysis with image statistics as a tool less prone to personal bias.

This attempts a synthesis of the contribution by the answers by @Tetsujin (because of the provision of a prior/after processing illustration) in comparison to the one of the squirrel (answer by @Danielillo) and the preview of your question.

Art aside, photography equally is a measurement; and every measurement has some random error. Inconsistencies in processing (electronic) photos can yield a non-uniform error level across a JPEG image which as such can be visualized like a map. One of the programs accessible to the public I'm aware of is forensically by Jonas Wagner created around 2012 (blog post, and 12 min youtube tutorial; both in English).

Let's submit the two versions of the bird image by @Tetsujin to perform an Error Level Analysis. To highlight the differences, an alternating gif of the two annotated illustrations:

(analysis based on the .png files shared, vide infra)

The differences might be subtle: watch the areas of patches of similar (false) color which tend to be more uniform for the smoothed illustration. For training purpose the same was applied on the portrait of the squirrel. We observe two level of noise here: the background, on one hand vs. animal and tree on the other. This is easy to comprehend by the use of a tele lens; here, used to «get close enough» (and in classical portrait photography, to separate the object from the less interesting background which should not distract too much from the former).

(based on the .png shared in the answer)

(based on the .jpg from the author's web page here)

The comparison shows that the file format can influence the result of this analysis (after all, .png are more suitable for screen photos anyway).

And eventually, the albatross. Bodies and necks, but not (so much) the feet clearly stand out this much in comparison to the surrounding grass that a high level of editing is likely. And the sky in the background.

(based on the .jpg of the preview here).

The similar tool fakeimagedetector offers a slider to show the true color image/false color representation of the noise map. After some time, you can't unsee the variation in coarseness in the later.

(screenphoto from https://www.fakeimagedetector.com/)

Addition

There are multiple types of errors which add up to noise in the image.

• photon shot noise: light is both wave and particle, but the arrival of photons on the detector is noncontinuous and random. The emission of photons need not be homogeneous across a surface area inspected, either.
• electronic noise of the readout: recording an image is assigning a pixel an intensity value. To obtain a larger number of charges per pixel eventually easier to process, this amplification may introduce an error.(1)
• quantization noise of the readout: the (amplified) analog signal is converted into a digital one. (Your analog signal may end up in the wrong digital bin.)

Aside from these, the pixels within a camera chip are not uniform; right from production, some may be less sensitive, than others. Repeated overexposure/too high levels of gain (especially ICCD camera), etc. may lead to dead pixels no longer recording a signal. Second, a pixel in operation can report intensity even in absence of a radiation source adding dark current noise. This however is more relevant to intentional observation of dim scenes / experiments with an extended period of exposure (e.g., fluorescence microscopy, astrophotography, X-ray crystallography) where one intentionally awaits temperature stabilization of the area detector, and collects dark frames for a subsequent background collection on individual frames. See (3) the above paraphrases.

These influences are all ahead of storing the information as .csv, .pgm, plain/LZW compressed .tiff. Or before the camera equally corrects white balance, adjusts sharpness, starts other electronic/AI filters (modern cellular phones) and applies a lossy compression like JPEG for the file available for you.(4) Subsequent edits on JPEGs require to encode parts of the retouched areas which then distort the file further, this and the transitions is spot by the program.

footnotes:

(1) With ICCD cameras,(2) this gain actually can be adjusted and can introduce additional problems down the road (leaving the linear range / where recorded signal is proportional to the intensity).

(2) Without particular endorsement, e.g. LaVision.

(3) Youtube videos Microscopy: Cameras and Detectors I: How Do They Work? and Microscopy: Cameras and Detectors II: Specifications and Performance by Nico Stuurman as part of a whole class around light microscopy and relevant image processing.

(4) How are Images Compressed? by BranchEducation is an instructive video about the steps of JPEG compression (color space conversion, chrominance downsampling, discrete coside transform, quantization the eventual Huffman encoding). It both explains the steps, and one gets an idea why recording a photo in a raw format rather than JPEG can be advantageous. (Not every image format constrains the the intensity depth to 8 bit per (color) channel (i.e., 256 levels) only.)

Answer 10

Note really an answer perhaps, more of an opinion:

For me it seems like the theres a lot of fuss over not very much.

Yes, there is much pixel peeping at edges, level of sharpening used, but I do not think that that was defining it as 'looking fake'. Sure, the processing looks like a lot on close inspection but I do not think that that 'is it' in terms of whats going on, if anything is...

Its simply the brightness of the birds against the duller background that is making people think it is not an entirely natural image. But I've seen, or even taken images that have given that effect before, usually unintentionally, and usually in natural lighting conditions where the sun pokes through on a not entirely sunny day and the subjects are bright anyway.

I think someone else did touch on it - the plumage of the birds are somewhat naturally luminous, and catch available light in a very broad way:

I do think the shadows and lighting match the birds self shadow and the fall on the ground

There is bright sunlight, it is falling on everything in the frame, the background and the birds.

Perhaps there is expectation that the dark plumage would also go bright with the fall of sunlight on it and I think the plumage does not do that, it retains its darkness.

Due to the natural brightness picked up on the birds, it is this area that looks a little too bright for people, and that is where the suggestion of an artificial light comes in, but i would argue against that, not last because using an artificial light is not a great idea with bird wildlife photography - i thin kit would be frowned upon in such circles, and the photographer has done a fair bit of bird photography. Flash is even less likely, as is a reflector - none of those ideas really match what is going on here, which is that the photographer was lucky in picking right time, place, and lens for the frame.

Coming from another angle, i have a background in 3d cgi as well, and to get that look in basic surfacing, we would modify fall off, making it broad, and probably adjusting certain bounce/diffuse maps and colors of the birds - all of which would produce a brighter, broader lit, bird, without adding an additional light - the sun is enough.

What makes it look unnatural?

A combination of lighting conditions at the time, direction, place, and lens, and the birds plumage,, against the background, is what makes them look superimposed. Yes, there is probably a bit of an issue with aggressive post processing, but I do not believe that this is the singular issue that is creating an issue.