Creative Speculation

... or so say some of the "photo analysts" in the conspiracy community. The top frame is an enlarged area of z317 (a straight 2x pixel enlargement with no smoothing). The second frame is a copy with a histogram adjustment applied to "spread out" the darker colors over a wider range, and the third frame is a gray-scale of that adjusted image, which shows the relative brightness of each pixel.



The claim is that a large left-rear exit wound was simply "painted out" on the Zapruder film negative. One "analyst" claimed it was so crudely done that it might have been done with a magic marker.

But the expanded histogram shows that the color of the head shadow is the same dark purple as other shadows in the limo, and in fact the darkest spot on the head is actually lighter than several spots on JFK's jacket and elsewhere.

If the film negative had simply been painted over, it would look more like the completely black (0,0,0 in all frames) unexposed film outside the image, because paint would block the light necessary to make an image from the negative (which of course is the presumed reason it was used). The head shadow also shows the same blocky, meaningless JPEG compression artifacts as the rest of the image, but some "analysts" seem to be unaware of what causes that artifacting and claim that's further evidence of a paint job, despite similar artifacts all over the image.

There is absolutely no indication of any paint job. The claim is based on "photo analysis" on a level comparable to that used by 9/11 "no-planers."