Here's how a bridal photo captured the same person in three poses at once

Depending on how "online" you are, you may have seen a photo with a strange quirk on social media: A woman — comedian Tessa Coates — standing in front of two mirrors in a bridal gown and, somehow, three Posing. simultaneously. , Coates insisted in his Instagram post that the photo had not been altered; It just came to light.

So what? Is this a glitch in iOS Live Photos (the iOS feature that takes short videos and chooses the best video)? A fake image manipulated with Photoshop? A brief glimpse of three different, parallel realities?

No, it's simpler than all of them. Faruk from the iPhonedo YouTube channel posted a short video on the threads explaining exactly what happened, and it's much simpler than you might expect.

Coates says it's multiple images stitched together using the iPhone 12's "pano" feature. Farooq discovered this by taking a look at the shot's metadata and saw that its resolution had been reduced from the main camera's normal resolution to 3028 x 3948, which is what happens when a photo is taken in panoramic mode.

This is because of how panoramic shots work on the iPhone. When you take a photo in "Pano" mode, the camera takes multiple photos and stitches them together to create one comprehensive photo. To keep the final images from looking completely shaky, the phone must crop them before stitching them, panning them up, down and to the sides to match the original images. The same principle applies to digital video stabilization, which produces smooth video from previously shaky footage.

This is somewhat similar to the iPhone's Deep Fusion computational photography feature, which compensates for dim light by taking multiple photos simultaneously within a fraction of a second and processing them at the pixel level to extract light, color and tone details . Then mixes them together. , then the Pixel 8 has Google's AI photo-editing tools, which let you take multiple photos and change faces, change backgrounds, or move entire people or things around to create the image you want instead of the one you took. Provide facility. Provide facility to go.

Stitching panoramic shots together is not that attractive, and it is not right either. Anyone who has taken their share of panoramic iPhone shots can attest that panoramics often yield strange artifacts like missing arms and distorted faces. In Coates' case, her phone's camera took multiple photos, and since she couldn't tell if the women in the mirror were also Coates, she didn't make sure to synchronize the poses. Farooq also succeeds in recreating this incident himself in his video. However, it's a shame. I was hoping we were actually seeing evidence of a multiverse.