Oh, and I forgot to mention the telltale borders, the mystery of the unmatched corners.
If ypou have seen the borders on Pat Decosta’s COB (Certificate of live Birth) and compared them to OBama’s COB, they look quite different, and I’ve been unsuccessful in reconstructing Obama’s borders from Decosta’s by doing such things as desaturization, color depth reduction, brightness and gamma uncreases, and so on.
I still wind up with a border that does not resemble Obama’s. Since the patterns on Decosta’s border are uniform (and those on Obama’s are not), any changes made to them occur uniformly.
It may be possible that the scan of Obama’s COB was done without closing the cover of the scanner. This would produce either lighter (or even darker) areas wherever the paper document was not flat against the scanner glass.
However, you would NOT see the lightened effect on all four sides of the borders unless the document was bent or bowed only in the middle.
Even in that unlikely scenario, there would be gradations on the scan that ran from the middle to the edges that would include the text and background as well. That is, if the borders were not lying flat on the scanner glass, neither would the adjacent text and green patterns, and you would be able to see them go from light and fuzzy to dark and clear.
No such modulation occurs, leacing the likelihood that the borders were drawn in.
One curious oddity corroborating that likelihood is the fact that the left and right vertical ends of the border overlap the horizontal top and bottom borders ON THE DAILY KOS image, but on the SMEARS image, these vertical ends do not overlap the horizontal borders but are exactly flush with them.
For those of you who use a graphics program to draw and align polygons, you know that the program has a feature called “SNAP TO” which allows the user to perfectly align objects along their edges, or along a common grid pattern.
In the SMEARS image, the edges of the vertical and horizontal borders are clearly aligned, while in the KOS image, these edges overlap. The person who provided the image for the SMEARS website likely took the time to use the “SNAP TO” feature of their graphics program, whereas the person who provided the KOS image likely did it by eye alone, OR, used a “SNAP-TO” grid that was misaligned along the edges of the horizontal border.
Some graphics programs have an “ALIGN” feature that would align two or more drawn shapes along their horizontal and vertical edges, or align them using a generated, underlying grid.
The only way to get individual shapes like borders to be perfectly aligned is to make their width and length as multiples of the grid unit, and then snap their edges to the grid.
It still does not resolve the reasons why the edges of the vertical border sections in the KOS image ovelap the edges of the horizontal border sections, whereas there are no overlapped edges in the SMEARS image.
Looking closely at the borders on the Decosta image, one can also see that the vertical and horizontal border sections are perfectly aligned.
Indeed. I pointed that out a couple weeks ago here.