For just a brief moment, photographer Drew Geraci thought he might have captured something out of this world. On his DNG file was a bizarre orb, the question had to be asked: had he just captured the best photo of a UFO ever?
Sadly for Geraci and everyone here at PetaPixel, the answer was more prosaic: an AI hallucination had somehow worked its way into the photographer’s RAW file.
Bizarre Artifact
When the rest of the United States were watching the Super Bowl on Sunday evening, Geraci headed out to capture photos of the bright, full Moon.
“Flash forward to the next morning, I started to edit a few of the photos,” Geraci, a Sony Artisan of Imagery, tells PetaPixel. “My normal workflow is to process my RAW files inside of Adobe Lightroom Classic and export from there.”
After he was happy with the edit, Geraci synced the settings across all the other pictures so he didn’t have to reprocess every image. However, there were a few small sensor spots that he used Lightroom’s Generative AI-powered “Remove” tool to eliminate.
Geraci chose one of the RAW files to crop vertically, deeming it a more interesting composition. He then deployed the “Denoise” tool on Adobe Lightroom, which removes digital noise — usually without issue — and generates a new DNG file.
“At this point, the image is still cropped,” he says. “I decided that I wanted to go back and re-compose the shot for Instagram, so I had to un-crop it. That’s when I noticed this orb-shaped object in the frame. It was incredibly weird, and I definitely didn’t see it when I first started processing the imagery.”
“My first thought when I saw this, because it was simply just strange, was like, ‘What the #$@% did I capture?’ I went back through the RAW photos on my camera but couldn’t see anything. I then decided to post the image on Facebook to see if anyone else had any ideas, and of course the number one answer was ‘It’s a UFO!!!’ or ‘It’s the Death Star!’”
Geraci insists that, as much as he would love it to be, he never truly considered that he’d captured a UFO. Yet, he couldn’t immediately explain what the weird orb was.
“After discussing it with other photographers (and even a few astronomers), I realized it had to be something in the processing of the imagery,” he says. Geraci went back and retraced his steps, undoing all of his edits and walking the image backward until he found the culprit.
“I came to the conclusion that because I used the ‘Remove’ tool, which has AI generative capabilities, and then used the denoise tool… My only choice was to accept that the image created an artifact from the removed area which turned into the ‘UFO,’” he explains.
Other photographers have had similar experiences using Generative Remove in recent versions of Adobe software, including a photographer earlier this year who had generative remove put a bitcoin in his bird photo.
“I’ve personally never had this happen on any other imagery that I’ve used, and even after trying to replicate it (and not having success), that’s the only logical answer as to what it could be.”
Geraci says it “would have been really neat to have taken the best or sharpest UFO image in history” but says it’s still taught him a valuable lesson: from now on he will be careful using generative AI-powered editing tools.
“I would prefer if Adobe would leave UFOs out of my work moving forward,” he jokes.
More of Geraci’s work can be found on his Facebook and website.
Image credits: Photographs by Drew Geraci
