The SamCait conspiracy theorists (CTs) count on the average fan not to know much about photography or photo manipulation. Without really understanding these things, their arguments (especially accompanied by important looking arrows) can seem convincing when they claim that a photo is a manip.

A number of people in the fandom assumed the Sam handholding photo was a manip because the clasped hands detail, when enlarged, looked strange, blurry, and to some, not even “human.”

Unfortunately, lots of people in the fandom don’t seem to understand that if you take a photo with a camera phone and you greatly enlarge a detail, the detail is going to be very fuzzy. And then if you add motion to the mix, parts of it are not going to “look human,” especially if you take a photo at the wrong moment.

Let me illustrate this with this gif of Cait from the 2015 Alexa photoshoots:

Now the gif above is clearly recognizable as a woman (although the curly hair is hiding Cait’s face a bit, so you might not realize that it is Cait). The quality of the gif isn’t great but that is okay given that we are talking about what happens when motion and enlargement are applied to poor quality photos. 

I split this gif into frames because when someone takes a photo of someone who is moving they are essentially taking one “frame.” So let’s look at one of the frames from the above gif to see how motion can distort the frame.

In the frame below we can certainly see some distortion in both Cait’s hands and her lower left arm.

Below the frame is enlarged by using a scale image tool:

[Note. The enlargement can only be seen on the web version of this post, not the mobile version.]

Even though the tool tries to correct the number of pixels in the enlargement so they are proportional to the original, an enlarged frame is still going to be fuzzier than the original frame. Look at Cait’s right hand, it looks even more like a club in the enlarged photo. Her left arm looks ridiculously skinny. The fingers on both hands basically disappear and her hands look like stubs.

Let’s look at one more frame from the gif:

Again, motion distorts both hands and the lower half of Cait’s left arm.

The distortion is even more pronounced in the enlarged frame above. [Note. The enlargement can only be seen on the web version of this post, not the mobile version.] Certainly Cait’s left hand and lower left arm don’t look “human.”

That’s what happens when a still photo of a moving subject is enlarged from a low quality photo/ frame. 

This brings us back to the Sam handholding photo. When we see the photo at a normal size, the hands look like “human hands.”

But when we enlarge the detail (and sharpen it--the photo below was definitely sharpened) it looks a lot stranger:

Sam’s thumb in particular looks very strange because it is in motion. 

All the distortion can be attributed to using a camera phone to take a photo of subjects that are in motion, and then enlarging a detail. 

I’ve taken the time to demonstrate this because the SamCait CT’s are constantly claiming that photos are manipulated. If you don’t understand certain principles, you can be easily fooled by their claims. 

I’m getting my Nancy Drew magnifying glass out. I sense a “pattern” here. This can’t just be a coincidence...

Okay, the first time that I know of that we see Sam in the light blue denim jacket is on July 20, 2017 at LAX as he was on his way to SDCC 2017:

We’ll call this day “Jacket Prime” since photos from this day were probably used in all the following manips shown below. 

Sam “wore” a similar jacket again on September 7, 2017 in NYC in what we now strongly suspect was a manip--because no man in his right mind would wear the same jacket more than once!

Then Sam was clearly manipulated into the photo below with Cait and Leanne Aguilera on June 13, 2018.

This must truly be a fiendish plot to gaslight Outlander fans if TPTB could use Cait and Leanne so poorly! 😩

Then we see “Sam” supposedly signing Cryptozoic Entertainment Cards in Glasgow on June 17, 2019:

Yeah, right, like I really believe that! How gullible do TPTB think we are?

And finally, the photo that convinced me ALL the above photos (except the one from NYC in September 2017) had to have been manips!

Yes indeed! There’s “Sam’ supposedly taking a stroll with a disembodied hand 😱 in London sometime around July 7, 2019!  . 

But it wasn’t the disembodied hand that gave it away as a manip. It was the fact that NO MAN COULD POSSIBLY CHOOSE TO WEAR THE SAME LIGHT BLUE DENIM JACKET OVER THE COURSE OF TWO YEARS!!!! 😱😱😱

No man would. So undoubtedly it had to be a manip using an old photo. And with that, all the puzzle pieces fell into place.

Oh TPTB are tricky. But we Outlander fans can see through their manipulations! 

Thank goodness I took my Nancy Drew PI training seriously! 🕵️‍♀️ 🔎 😂 😘

[edited]

Someone whom I respect sent me this comparison that someone is circulating who is claiming the Sam hand holding photo is a manip. Because this fooled someone I respect, undoubtedly it has fooled many other fans. Consequently, I’m going to take the time to look at the comparison photo and debunk it.

On the right is Sam’s and the mystery woman’s hand and on the left is the photo they claim was manipulated onto it.

The problem is the images are not exactly alike because the fingers are in slightly different positions. It has to be an exact match for one photo to be established as being manipulated onto another. Yes, the rings could be added later. (But why would anyone bother? Do you know how hard that is to do?) 

Okay, let’s look at some of the differences.

1) The man’s knuckle on the left extends much further down than the one on the right.

2) The woman’s ring finger on the right slightly overlaps the middle finger on the upper part nearest the fingernail and is slightly bent at the knuckle closest to the nail. The woman’s ring finger on the left is not bent at that knuckle and it doesn’t overlap the middle finger at that point. 

3) The woman’s index finger on the left is slightly bent. The woman’s index finger on the right is not bent to the same degree. 

4) The man’s hand on the right curves much more than the man’s hand on the left.

5) The man’s hand on the left shows a slight projection of a finger with what appears to be a ring on it. The the man’s hand on the right has no such projection of a finger or ring. 

6) The woman’s thumb juts out more on the hand on the left than it does on the hand on the right.

7) The man’s knuckle on the thumb on the right has a more accentuated knuckle than the one on the left. The one on the left also has more folds on the skin.

8) The blurriness of the man’s thumb on the right is due to motion. We don’t see a similar blurriness on the man’s thumb on the left. 

I also see slight differences in the shapes of the fingers and to me the woman’s middle finger on the right has a longer fingernail than the one on the left (although it is hard to tell because the photo is so blurry).

In short, they are not the same hands. Very close but not the same.

Again, the photos have to be exact matches for to claim one was manipulated onto the other. I also think we are dealing with a camera phone that took a photo in motion, which is why the hand on the right is so blurry. 

I could care less if Sam was holding hands with Christina. Even if he was, it doesn’t mean that they are a couple. What I do have a problem with though is conspiracy theories. I think it is odd that some people immediately thought that someone “conspired” to manipulate this photo for some nefarious purpose. 

I never saw the original photo on Facebook. I understand that a friend of the photographer posted it. I have no idea if the woman in the photo was cropped out of the photo or not. The way the photo appears might have just been the way the photo was taken (and some people do claim that is the case). The poster apparently deleted the photo when the usual suspects descended and started to grill her for more information.

To my knowledge the original poster didn’t identify the woman as Christina. That happened afterwards and I believe it was SamCait conspiracy theorists (CTs) who identified the tattoo and figured out it must be Christina.

Since Christina is a celebrity, apparently certain SamCait CTs just looked up all her social media information and started to leave nasty comments. 

I feel badly that they did that but I am not going to say this was a manip when from what I can tell it wasn’t. The trolls will attack no matter what I say. That’s what they do.

Regardless, I’m not going to feed conspiracy theories. Sorry, they are way too destructive to this fandom. I don’t believe the photo was a manip. I think the major ones who believe that are people who really need it to be a manip because they don’t want to believe that Sam was with a woman who wasn’t Cait. JMHO

Apparently certain SamCait conspiracy theorists (CTs) think they have found the “source” that was used to “manipulate” the handholding Sam/ Christina photo.They reportedly believe the hands belong to Jessica Beil & Justin Timberlake.

Well, having made manips myself, I can tell you that unless someone is a super skilled artist that can add some realistic elements to an image that doesn’t match exactly, it won’t work in a manip. And there is no evidence that the fingers in the hands on the photo were drawn on the photo in any way. 

So, nice try SamCait CTs but when it comes to finding sources for manips, you don’t get points for trying. The match has to be exact.

BTW, now that I know a full image of Sam was included in the photo, I decided to see if we could find the source of the manip of full Sam (or someone who looks a lot like him) on the Internet. 

Although the SamCait CTs were claiming that it was an old photo of Sam from June 2018, we know that when Sam wore this jacket and T-shirt back then, he was onset in Glasgow.

But the background of the handholding photo was from Southbank Centre in  London.   

So either Sam was in London this past weekend or an old photo of Sam was manipulated onto the London background. 

I looked through photos and a few videos that Leanne Aguilera made with Sam back in June 2018, when he was wearing the jacket and T-shirt, and didn’t find anything that matched that photo.

So I ran the full length photo of Sam through TinEye and this is what I got:

Then I ran it through Google Images and this is what I got:

The only exact matches were on Outlander tumblr blogs and they were all of the recent handholding photo.

Again, you need some exact images to do a manip of the kind that the SamCait CTs claim was done to the handholding photo.

As far as I can tell, they don’t exist.

So far there is no evidence that the photo was a manip.

BTW, why would a random fan be trying to pass off a manip as real anyway?