Wesley Hillard, a self-described “rumor expert,” writes on AppleInsider:
A British comedian and actress named Tessa Coates was trying on wedding dresses when a shocking photo was taken of her, according to her Instagram post shared by PetaPixel. The photo shows Coates in a dress in front of two mirrors, but each of the three versions of her had a different pose.
One mirror showed her with her arms down, the other mirror showed her hands clasped at her waist, and her real self was standing with her left arm at her side. For anyone who doesn’t know better, this could be a pretty shocking image.
On the contrary, to anyone who “knows better,” this image clearly seems false. But it’s a viral sensation:
Coates, in his Instagram description, states, “This is a real photo, not retouched, not panoramic, not Live Photo,” but I’m willing to say that he is either lying or wrong about how the photo was taken. Doing so feels a little awkward, given that the post was meant to celebrate their engagement, but I just don’t buy it. These are three completely different arm poses, not three moments in time fractions of a second apart, and all three poses in the image are perfectly sharp. iPhone photography simply does not work in a way that produces this image. I would feel less confident that this was false if there was motion blur in the arms in the mirrors. You can get very strange looking photos from an iPhone’s Pano mode, but again, Coates claims this is not a Pano mode image. (Perhaps you can generate an image like this using the Google Pixel 8’s Best Take feature, but it’s supposedly from an iPhone, which doesn’t have a feature like that. And even with Best Take, that’s a feature you can invoke manually, using multiple original images as input. I don’t think any The camera on a phone, let alone an iPhone, produces unique still images like this.)
In a Threads thread, where several commenters are legitimately skeptical:
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Tyler Stalman (who hosts an excellent podcast on photography and videography):
Any iPhone photographer can confirm that this is not an image processing error, it would never look like this.
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David Imel (MKBHD writer/researcher):
I really, REALLY don’t think this is a real picture. HDR on phones takes 5 to 7 frames with split-second exposure times. The whole process like 0.05 sec. Even a live photo lasts <2 seconds.
Even if the phone thought they were different people, it wouldn’t sew like that and wouldn’t have time.
This is spreading everywhere and it’s driving me crazy.
I challenge anyone who thinks this is legitimate to produce an image like this using an iPhone with even a single mirror in the scene, let alone two. If I’m wrong, let me know.
Update 1: Claude Zeins accepts my challenge.
Update 2: In a long story post, Coates says he went to an Apple store looking for an explanation and Roger, the “big grand wizard” of geniuses in the store, told him that Apple is “beta testing” a feature as Google’s Best Take. . Which is not something Apple does, and if they did, it would require that she had knowingly installed a beta version of iOS.
★ Friday, December 1, 2023
