[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.

[usmcobra]

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.

None of which means anything if you can't change the way the picture looks...

One I just did and the other is an enlargement of the "Original".

[jwalburg]

So, are you saying there is no doctoring here? I left sin and cos behind in high school, so I'm innumerate now and don't quite follow you.