[snowman1]

I will be greatly surprised if the MSM isn’t ready to crucify you to no end. “HOW DARE YOU CALL THE MESSIAH A FRAUD.”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[kbennkc]

I believe you , I just don’t have the knowledge to understand you . If I had an ounce of technical savvy I would steal you work and sell it to the National Enquirer .

[marron]

Let me see if I understand what you’re saying.

A deliberate forgery was created knowing it would be uncovered, just so they could later debunk the forgery accusations while never supplying the original...

Am I getting this right?

[CodeToad]

“Bitmap palettes are limited to 256 colors “

Ah, no. Bitmaps, to include DIBs, can be 32 bit color to include an alpha blending value. 8-bit bitmaps are rtestricted to 256 colors, but not all bitmaps.

[freespirited]

Ron,

Don’t forget to thank the lefty loons at Media Matters for going berserk this morning and alerting the entire MSM that technical experts have concluded that the COLB is forged. Which of course they do not believe. ;-).

[Nuc1]

Thanks so much for the clear information. The real question is if O was born in Hawaii why forge a COLB? I think we know the answer. I bet this issue is at least in part, why he is in Hawaii right now.

Again thanks for the great work.

[Ann Archy]

Ron....who is PD who the COLB really belongs to????

[Lee'sGhost]

It won’t be an October surprise. It will be an August surprise. Just about the time PIAPS gets her floor vote at the convention.

[danamco]

Hussein Obama could learn something from the chicom’s Olympic girl gymnastics’s “birth certificates” or passports!!!

[HAL9000]

Interesting analysis, but I don’t have enough confidence about it yet to endorse your conclusions. There may be plausible explanations for the anamolies besides forgery.

[LucyT]

Thanks, Polarik.

Ping.

[Calpernia]

BTT!

Boot The Toot!

[pissant]

Well, we must figure out a way to get this up the food chain, so to speak. I know Corsi mentioned it on Fox this AM, but we need to get Hannity or Rush on the case. National Review’s Geraghty threw in the towel long ago.

[NaughtiusMaximus]

BTTT

[Dajjal]

Obumpa

Wonderful work!!!!

[Polarik]

IMAGE FORGERY 101

I apologize for making my post a bit too technical for many of you. Sometimes, it's not that easy to please everyone along the image editing continuum. So, I will attempt to provide a less technical, more common sense approach to explaining how to create an image forgery. Befoee I begin, however, a few people asked me to clarify a few things I mentioned.pertinent questions.

Someone asked me, "What is the 'PD' COLB?" This was the only COLB image ever posted on the Internet at the time that the Kos COLB forgery was made. The owner of that COLB is the daughter of the woman whose name appears on it, and who is not at all happy that other people, myself included, were using it for purposes never intended. I spoke with the daughter, who is a very nice person, and I told her that I would not be referring to her Mother's name anymore. I also suggested that she either remove it, or make it totally unusable for its intended purpose. She did the latter.

Here is my Five Step program:

1. Find a genuine image that you can use as a guide or template.
   
   If you want to create a believable forgery, you have to start with a real example. In the case of the Kos image forgery, the genuine image used as a guide or template was a real example of a Hawaiian COLB that had been posted to a genealogy website.
   
   
2. Choose an image editing program that you know how to use and will do what you want.
   
   One of the Kos COLB image clones that I created was done with Microsoft Paint -- a very basic image editor -- in the span of about two minutes. Cresting an image forgery from an image is easy if the original that you start with is easy to modify, as the COLB turnout out to be.
   
   
3. Decide what information you need to change and what information you can keep.
   
   When I say, "Which information you can keep," I'm not suggesting to physically leave any existing printed information from the original. All of the original typed information must be replaced by freshly typed information so that all the type looks consistent.
   
   In other words, if Honolulu is actually where Obama was born, you would still need to erase "Honolulu" and re-enter it using your current font throughout the document. The font has to be consistent for all text entries. In other words, you cannot leave any existing field titles like CITY OF BIRTH and "Honolulu" because the font will not match the original font.
   The goal is to make an image whose text font is consistent across the entire COLB.
   
   If you don't replace all of the text with a new font, then the forged text will stick out like a sore thumb. Others will recognize the differences among the fonts. Genuine COLBs use the same type face (font) throughout the document -- only the size of the font used for field titles is larger than the data typed in below it. If the font style is not the same across the document image, then people can spot it and use it as evidence that the text has been replaced.
   
   
4. Pick the simplest way to remove or obscure the old information.
   
   There is more than one way to remove or erase existing text prior to typing in new text. One involves filling in the letters with background colors.
   
   The other way, and the one that does a better job, is copying a rectangular section from a blank portion of the background and pasting it over the existing text.
   
   This is the simplest way of eliminating any traces of prior information, and also the most effective. In the case of the COLB, the background has a simple repeating pattern that makes it easier to copy a portion of the blank background that matches the background underneath the existing type and pasting it over the old text by lining it up with the previous pattern.
   
   The image editing software must be able to create a cutout (or copy of the background) that you can move around before pasting it in place over the old text. In fact, the simplest way of covering up old text prior to typing over the "new" background is make a mental note of where on the background the old text began.
   
   You can use the inside edges of your computer display as a guide for making the first text entry, by scrolling the image left and right until the left edge of the first letter of the existing text entry is lying right next to the left edge of your screen.
   
   Then, you can align the bottom of the existing text by scrolling up and down until the bottom edge of the first word is lying above the bottom edge of your screen. Lastly, paste the blank background over the existing text, and type in the new info using your screen edges as a guide for putting it in place.
   
   
5. Cover any traces that your image was manufactured.
   
   I cannot emphasize this point enough. You need to make sure that the newly-pasted background pieces line up with the existing background, and that all of the text is consistently typed in the right places. One way of checking you work is to create an overlay, similar to creating animated GIFs like the ones above. If you've never done that, then you can even use two printouts: the original image is printed on paper, and the modified image is printed on transparency.
   
   By placing the transparency over the paper printout, you can see just how well both the pasted background and the new text match the underlying printout of the existing image.
   
   

The last step is saving your work as a JPG file. Most, if not all, image editing software can edit and save JPG images (which are the standard format of digital cameras). Choosing the size of the saved image and the degree of quality (image compression percentage) will have a definite effect on how easily or difficult it will be to spot any evidence of forgery.

Like I noted above, Microsoft Paint (a program that comes with Windows), could be used to make the forgery. It's not the best one to use, but it is readily available.

I may create a video demonstrating these steps because I know that there are people who are reading this, and who have never used a graphics program at all.

[Polarik]

UPDATE

I need to make a change to one of the points I made in my post.

I said in that post that the border on the Kos image was a red herring because someone created it as a diversion.

After careful consideration, a much simpler scenario as to why this border looks different from all other COLB borders, is that it is different. However, the forger of the image did some modifications to the border such that it looks like it was the last piece added. What I see when looking at the Kos COLB border is an image that had its hue, saturation, contrast, and brightness levels modified in addition to saving it as a JPG file with a 45% compression ratio.

The technical stuff is not crucial to one's understanding that the Obama COLB image was deliberately constructed from two real COLBS, one belonging to PD's 2002 COLB image, and the other belonging to a "as yet unnamed" contributor.

Although I do not know the identity of the person listed on the 2007 COLB image, I can say with 100% certainty that it was not Maya Soetoro.

A real 2007 border versus a bogus one does not affect my findings at all because I've said all along that the border pattern is of no research value to me. What's inside the borders is what matters to me.

This change of heart, so to speak, further strengthens my research findings in several respects. For one thing, by my second blog post, I decided that the border was an oddity, but one that did not pose any problems for my conclusions.

A real border actually simplifies them, because I had a little trouble imagining that a forger would intentionally screw up a border. Many of you had voiced similar concerns, and they were taken to heart.

Before making allowances that the Kos image border was a real one, I had assumed that the border and the background were a packaged deal; that is, both were copied from a real COLB image at the same time.

Before accepting the possibility that the border was real, however, I had to listen to everyone else bitching about the border being bogus, and criticizing me for ignoring it.

So, I decided to go along with the consensus opinion that the borders were bogus, too. However I never agreed with TechDude's singular focus on the borders (and that phantom missing border). Apparently, quite a few blogs bought into it as well.

Meanwhile, the pro-Obama detractors were also focusing on the borders, but for different reason. They were the ones saying that it was a vintage, 2007 border.

From the beginning, I kept emphasizing the pixel halos around the text were a sure sign that they had been added to an existing image. It took me awhile to identify that image, and when I learned that it matched the Kos on all of its printed areas, it didn't matter whether the border was a part of it or not.

To me, the border was still a red herring, but nobody else agreed with me, so I went along with the group.

The Kos image border still looks messed up, real or not, because its quality looks worse than the background it sits upon, and that's why people probably thought it was bogus (that, and the fact that no one had ever seen a 2007 COLB). The border could very well have been added as the last piece of the puzzle. One reason why the border was added last (from a real 2007 COLB) is because the border on the original template image (made from PD's COLB) had distortions in it from the folds.

And, of course, it came from a totally different time period.

Hopefully, the MSM will ignore those who have come and gone before me, who left a trail of false conclusions in their wake.

If they can do that, then perhaps they will refer to my research for a change.