Site launched on the 23rd February 2025
Site launched on the 23rd February 2025
Software and phone apps
Phone apps
Perhaps the most common ‘ghost photograph’ that crosses my desk these days is the product of the deliberate use of a ghost app or other software. They’re also seemingly everywhere online – just today I’ve seen three examples. You probably know the type, where the poster starts the description of “… this was taken by a friend/friend of a family member. At the time there was nothing seen out of the ordinary, but when he/she/they got home they looked at this and got scared…”
Yeah – right. In most cases its pretty obvious if you know what you’re looking for. In others, not so much.
These days phone apps can pretty much insert any image onto another image, so it doesn’t have to be a known ghost image from an app. Its essentially doing a virtual ‘double exposure’ – but as that would mean taking time to create a spook or shape to overlay, most folk just use a dedicated app, already preloaded with lots of spooky inserts. So, based entirely on this, you can see that the majority of people who use the apps (usually found in the pranks or entertainment listings on your phone) would realise these images are faked…
Recently, I was watching a video on Youtube, from a popular US-based Youtube ‘ghosthunter’, where she showed the audience what app she was using, took a photograph, and then showed the ghostly image to the camera stating she’d caught a ghost on the phone. The link here I think is common sense and gullibility – but I may be being too kind here, and I digress.
A few years ago I started to collate the innumerable ghost app images, but gave up in the end as I didn’t want to waste any time or money on them, especially when I found the following Facebook page: “THERE’S A (GHOST) APP FOR THAT“. In it, a good amount of images usually seen in app-generated pics are listed, and you can request folk on there to help identify the app used in a suspicious picture.
The method used by the apps I’ve looked at is to use an existing background image from your phone’s gallery, or you can use the app to take a new one. The ‘ghost’ is then added on as a transparency overlay – you can alter size, angle, transparency etc to tweak it for maximum effect. In most cases this produces a ‘tell’ when you zoom in close enough, as the transparent overlay has a different opacity/pixel count to your original image, and you can see the difference easily.
Software
The use of software to produce ghost images is also common practice. In some cases, these are done as works of art, which in some cases get hijacked, ownership claims nicked and reissued as paranormal. A good example is this ‘dementor’ pic on Deviantart, which I’ve seen doing the rounds claimed by multiple artists as a ‘real’ ghost pic: https://www.deviantart.com/spec-/art/Ghost-4544679.
A standard ghost photograph trope is that of the transparent figure – easy enough to do if you’ve got a suitable background and the figure you want to add. Its just a case of cutting out the figure from its original background, pasting it on the background and then resizing and blurring/adding transparency to the figure. The example below uses John (the pic I used was John stooping below a low ceiling – he’s a tall chap!) overlaid. I first added a base transparency, then a varied eraser around the edges.
So what are the main tells in an image such as this? Zooming in on the ‘ghost’ can provide evidence of tampering, for example in the example of John, his shoulder can be seen to be affected by a different light source than the rest of the image and the top of his head and forehead can be seen to have a darker line – the remnant of a shadow from the original image.
When John was removed from his pic’s original background, the cut can also be seen to have left a more pixellated and hard edge than the rest of the image, especially in contrast to the partially erased area of the ‘apparition’. This is most obvious in the area of his trousers.
EXIF data
For years, Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) data could be used to check the authenticity of digital images. The data is produced upon creation of an image in a digital camera, and records elements such as date created, date modified, exposure time, camera model etc. As such, when you had access to the digital format of an image you could check authenticity: for example, in the cases of a software created image, EXIF will be absent and exposure time could be checked to see if long exposure effects could be in play. The data could also be used to check reported times and locations (if a camera had GIS geolocation turned on, and assuming that the camera had the correct date and time set). Basic EXIF data can be read by Windows 11 itself: more advanced data can be read in most image editing software.
The problem is that now most image editing software allows EXIF data to be edited. As such, unless you get direct and immediate access to the photograph there is now no way to confirm the authenticity of EXIF data.
So has anyone been shown or is on the receiving end of a ghost app photograph? If so, why not send me the image with the app name (if you know it) and I’ll pop it in the example gallery.
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