The way her arm is positioned makes me think she’s asleep or passed out…she sort of reminds me of some of the kids I remember seeing in my 8 AM classes.
Add me to the “see nothing creepy” list. Just boredom.
About every six months, I’ll click on a link that takes me to another link that takes me to a missing persons website. Naturally, I’ll start poking around and seeing who’s missing in my state and then expand outward. There’s something extremely depressing about see how old some of these cases are. We get a brief description of the person’s disappearance and a faded, yellow photograph of them. If they’re lucky, they’ll have an age-progression sketch. These families will likely never receive closure. The most heartbreaking ones are the bodies who were never even identified. Often times the only photograph they have in these cases is a piece of a jewelry or clothing. It doesn’t exactly fill you with a lot of hope when they ask you if you remember seeing a woman hitchhiking on the freeway 20 years ago who wore a ring that looked like this. Just by looking at the sheer number of people who are listed on those sites and the circumstances in which they disappeared it’s very easy to get creeped out and think to yourself, “Are there really that many sickos out there snatching people?” Apparently so.
The photo in the news story didn’t really have an effect on me either when I first saw it. It was posted in another message board and I saw the photo before reading the story. Just looked like a sleepy woman. That’s why I think the photograph has been significantly altered. It would take a pretty large leap of logic to equate “gravely injured” from that photo as it looks now. Also, the fact that it was retouched by a forensic artist makes me think that more was done than just adjusting light levels. Or maybe I’m just naturally pessimistic.
You know how a “wet paint” sign makes people touch the fence then be surprised they’ve got paint on their finger? That’s kind of what just happened with me, that link, and your post. Creeped out indeed. :eek:
She’s probably just drunk or wasted on one of the myriad drugs available.
If she was injured or dead, why would someone snap her picture and leave it lying around?
It’s most likely one of those photos that frat boys take of their trashed ho-bags to wave in their face on Monday (or maybe Wednesday) morning as a “joke”.
She looks dead as hell, but that might be due to the freakish amount of retouching that’s obviously been done to the picture. I think the fact that it looks so unnatural due to the weird blurring of the face and whatever they did to the eyes that it’s striking people as being even more “off” than it probably would be otherwise.
Assuming, of course, that what they edited out wasn’t a bullet hole or blood or bruises.
Look at the angle of her arm and her neck. It really looks off and bad. It looks like she’s in some sort of box, too.
What about the angle of her arm and her neck? I see nothing wrong there. You just see the top of her wrist and the heel of her hand (her fingers disappear into her hair). Basically, it looks as if she’d been resting her head on her hand, leaning the way most people do when they’re tired, and fell asleep (kind of like a more sideways “The Thinker”.)
The “box” looks more like the wooden arm of a couch and someone was standing up shooting downwards at her. Totally like shots of my friends passed out at a party from my wayward misspent youth.
As for “crazy angles of arms and necks”, may I submit some other examples from a GIS of “asleep” and “passed out”:
Look at the angle of his arms! Unnatural!
Definitely, totally dead. Look at her mushy face.
Poor, poor, child. Must be dead (The “Exhibit #1” is a joke. He was napping.")
ETA: These are photos that were clear enough to go on the web. There are probably tons more that were too out of focus or crappy, so no one put them up.
Oh, hey! Sorry about the triple-post, but this picture is EXACTLY what I was trying to describe above when I said “The Thinker”.
It is very similar to the “creepy photo”, only it’s clear, at a better angle, and the woman isn’t waking up. The smae picture taken with a crappy cellphone (or buy a drunk photographer) would look a helluva lot like the “corpse lady.”
I might be wrong, but I get the impression that this woman is severely injured and the photo has been retouched, largely to protect unsuspecting relatives if worse comes to worse and maybe to aid in identifying her.
So, yeah, she looks drunk/passed out in this photo, but this isn’t the original photo but a heavily doctored version.
It seems as if her hand was retouched - anybody else with that impression?
Tell me about… I just wasted about 40 minutes at work. It’s worse than crimelibrary.
You might want to ask the guy who took this picture and then dropped it in a parking lot in Florida.
There’s a bit of a discussion about the arm on the Websleuths board. I think the picture is too vague to tell if it’s a right arm or left arm, judging by the obscured hand. It seems to be facing palm up. If it’s her right hand, it seems to be awkwardly positioned. It was suggested that it might not be her hand at all, but someone else’s who is propping her head up to get a better picture.
With the unnatural color of the lips and way her chin seems to end in a blur, I get the impression she was gagged with tape and this area was retouched. Also, the area behind her ear seems to be strangely absent of hair. Gravely injured, they said. Damn, this is gnawing at me.
There’s got to be folks on this board who are well-versed in Photoshop techniques. I’d like to hear their takes on the matter.
If that large white patch on her cheek that looks like the camera light is an injury, then yeah, I agree.
In which case it would have been useful for the article to say “this is a close-up of her face” and say more explicitly that the rest of the photo contains evidence of injury.
As it is. It just looks like a crappy version of a photo like the one in my last post, and that “investigators” are just jumping to conclusions.
As for her hand being re-touched, there is a rectangular, almost-horizontal streak that runs across the image catching her hand, nose, lips, chin, neck, and makes part of her shirt a more vibrant blue than the rest. It looks more like a defect caused by a scanner.
I worked in graphic design for ten years and am well-versed in Photoshop. It looks like a low resoultion photo, like from a cellphone, that they tried to enhance the color saturation and contrast. The position of her hand looks like the one in my Thinker post, but at a lower angle. It’s her left hand, palm up, the really meety part is the base of her thumb.
Oh for fuck’s sake. Were any of these retouched by a forensic artist? What do you think a forensic artist does? I’ll tell you. Facial reconstruction of skulls. Computer generated composites. Age progression sketches and sculptures. He’s not some dork sitting around on his computer taking the red eye out of drunk people in keg party pictures.
Okay, let me reduce the one to a low resolution shot, then fiddle with the contrast.
A lot of the work I used to do invovled trying to restore very, vey bad original images to try to glean visual data from them. That was my job. Some of the phots were circa Civl War and were even wose to work with.
The article states:
“The photo has been touched up by an OSBI forensic artist for public release.”
Here’s the photo from the Sheriff’s office:
That image is far, far, far better thatn the “touched up by a forensic artist” one. Why the hell didn’t they release that one? It’s much more clear. And creepier. There is also very clearly what could be a busted lip, and what could be blood on her hand and arm and her hair looks to be saturated with something.
I withdraw my previous opinion.
Here I rotated the original, and did some similar touch ups to remove the more obvious signs of trauma, but I didn’t go all out and change the color of her lips or her eyelid. I also greatly reduced the file size.
I don’t know why they did’t release something more like this, than that other pixelated crap.
ETA: Actually, I bet the photo in the OP is a video capture from TV. That’s why it looks like poop. The website should have released a proper web-optimized photo.
Interesting. I don’t know why the picture on this site is so small, but if you save it to your computer, it opens at a much larger size. There seems to be a bloody gash about an inch behind her ear that’s not apparent in the original retouched photo.