[usmcobra]

note the wavy areas in the smoke, that's an amatuer Pic Wytching.Note the rest of his body has no such wavy areas.

Now here's one of mine, even blown up 500% you can't spot the wytched or wavy pixels.

[jwalburg]

hmm. I'm not seeing this. I do note, though, that his shirt is wavy. Not permanent press.

[mvpel]

You may be seeing JPEG compression artifacts in the first picture - the second photo may have been scanned with less aggressive compression algorithm settings.

[Windcatcher]

"note the wavy areas in the smoke, that's an amatuer Pic Wytching.Note the rest of his body has no such wavy areas."

The wavy areas around the guy are from JPEG compression. JPEG tends to ghost areas of high detail when the compression level is high. I think the reason is that it uses trigonometric Sin() and Cos() functions as the basis for the compression, so there tends to be some repetition away from areas of detail (though it's attenuated). As a side note, the boxes in the main pic that are visible when you zoom in (the pic that spawned this post) are also from JPEG compression. Standard JPEG95 compression compresses along 8x8-pixel areas and in every JPEG you see (that are compressed with JPEG95, which is *much* more ubiquitous than JPEG2000) you'll see these boxes aligned along 8-pixel boundaries.