Hi folks, so we have this image that appears corrupted. I’m interested to know if there’s a hidden message within it or if there’s some form of corruption or alteration that we can identify.
If you can help, dive right in! =)
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Here’s my quick amateur attempt at lining some of this up. I haven’t seen anyone do this yet so I figured I’d try. There’s still some “puzzle” pieces at the top I’m trying to size up.
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Hasn’t anyone noticed that there’s an almost uncorrupted image of the object on the left hand side of the picture?
To me it does look like something being rendered within NMS engine. Also seems very portal like. That’s about all the help I can offer havin no way of dissecting the image is self with software etc
Looks like a head to me. Maybe an insect. One green eye left, and on the right side you can see the second.
The thing in the middle (a wing facing up?) would suggest it’s a robotic insect of sorts.
The picture looks really familiar though, but I can’t remember where I might have seen this before.
I think what you’re seeing on the left is just ghosting from the object on the right.
You can do a similar thing with this website to get an idea of how this image has been corrupted
My minds eye keeps bringing back an old pic from Morrowind. I know it’s not actually, but it keeps doing it.
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No, by "left I mean the biggest green orb near the middle.
Oh I get you, I see it now 
My mistake
There’s no question in my mind that this is a puzzle we haven’t solved. I don’t think they would bother to link to the original image that’s in the PDF unless there was data or meaning we needed to extract from it.
To give some background, this is a JPEG image that has been corrupted after being saved. They have changed data in the JPEG file which, when decoded and displayed, results in these distortions. “Glitching” images using this technique is pretty common.
If we had a source image, we could figure out what data was changed, but no attempts to find it have been successful. It’s possible there is data hidden in the image, but no one has been able to find anything meaningful. I found what looks like a hex color “# 3 3 3 2 0 0”, but I don’t know the significance. Turning it into an IP range as we did last time (51.50.0) points to the UK Department of Work and Pensions, which is probably not relevant unless it’s a secret Brexit protest message. 
I spent a bit of time with a hex editor last night and was able to re-align the pixellated image at the bottom into one contiguous object:
Someone on reddit also manually cleaned up the image using an image editor to align all the offset pieces:
Many people think it looks like a building in NMS, and some think it looks like a ship, but no one has been able to point out something similar yet. The markings on the structure certainly don’t look like anything from NMS, and look to me more like Italian Renaissance flourishes.
p.s. there’s a spelling error in the title
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I see what you’re seeing now. The other “eye” is it’s left. If you can visualize the very corrupted portion below as “tentacles” it almost looks like a giant squid (or Kraken maybe…)
Hmm, I was thinking Final Fantasy ish weapon or armor style. But I can’t place it in any of the ones I’ve played yet, so that’s probably my mind playing tricks.
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seen that photo which was manually manipulated, cool in itself but not an answer.
We don’t even know what the question is yet.
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I want to say babelfish but then i’m a geek for hitchhikers
I will try and have a look today, I have some experience in repairing damaged jpgs. Also data repair, if there are other images or corruption please send me a link. Also can someone send me the actual link to this image. Thanks
Now I just need to find the editor I use to use /sigh
The image in the OP goes to the original JPEG linked in the PDF. But just in case, it’s “https://s3.amazonaws.com/cdn.wakingtitan.com/data/s01-091d12cf-befd-4f85-8644-3a2e74d56a8a.jpg”
As far as hex editors, HxD is a popular one for Windows. I’ve been using Hex Fiend on the Mac.
Yeah, hex editor’s are all good… But there is a specific jpg editing program I have somewhere that let’s me do some pretty cool stuff to images. When I find the name I will let you know so you can check it out.
Full disclosure, I am a data recovery engineer, and though I specialise in physical repair I do have some pretty unique tools. But I’m off work at the moment so I don’t have access to everything haha
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I almost feel like the below tool has been used to create the glitched image. The results in the exmple are very similar to the glitch effects we see in the pdf image. I do however doubt there is an easy way to reverse the process, if even possible at all.
[details=Info]With this app, you can glitch your own images by dragging an image into the browser window. You can use the sliders in the control panel to alter the glitched parameters. The image updates in real time.
This app corrupts some bytes in an image. Because of the way JPEG encoding works, the corrupted file still shows a corrupted image. It was inspired by soulwire’s experiment in Flash.
This tool was created by Georg. He is always happy to learn about the things that people are creating with his tools. You can follow him on Twitter or explore the source code of this app on GitHub.
If you like this glitch tool, you can check out some of Georg’s other JavaScript experiments.[/details]
Image Glitch Tool (online jpg glitch tool)