[supercat]

Supercat: I have challenged anyone to take a COLB of very high resolution (6600 x 5100 @ 600dPI) and make it look just like the Kos image right down to those pesky pixels in-between letters, by changing ONLY the JPG compression ratios and/or file sizes.

I don't know any way to adjust any known-good birth certificate so as to make the borders or letter spacing match. The white fringes between the letters, however, can be produced pretty well by setting the chroma compression factor to about 500 and the luma to about 100 (use the 'custom...' button. Not a perfect match by any stretch, but good enough to demonstrate that such fringes can be produced purely as a result of JPEG artifacts. The same method, BTW, causes a lack of green in the inverse text in the top and bottom borders--an effect which is also noticeable in the Kos image.

[Polarik]

The white fringes between the letters, however, can be produced pretty well by setting the chroma compression factor to about 500 and the luma to about 100 (use the 'custom...' button. Not a perfect match by any stretch, but good enough to demonstrate that such fringes can be produced purely as a result of JPEG artifacts. The same method, BTW, causes a lack of green in the inverse text in the top and bottom borders--an effect which is also noticeable in the Kos image.

Editing the image at the pixel level would also produce similar results. But, is that really plausible?

Why would anyone want to make it less like the original by monkeying around with settings about which they are probably clueless?

I lean towards Occam's Razor here.

Also, this is "Show and Tell" time. I've shown you mine, now you show me yours. ;-)