Here's the image:
What is hidden on it and how was it made?
I got it!
First attempt:
I separated the RGB channels, XOR'd them with each other, inverted them, and arbitrarily assigned the results
R=~(R^G); G=~(R^B); B=~(G^B)
based on what would make the hair and skin hue broadly correct.
Result image:
The result isn't correct, but it made whatever component caused the moire patterns drop out.
EDIT: I got it!
The image is XOR'd with the function
(x*y)%256
.
Final image:
Clean function:
x^y
map eventually, but I thought it would be too much. Congratulations.
$\endgroup$
This is how far I got; I created a python script to create a background image that I substracted from the given image (Update):
This is the Python script I used:
import sys
from PIL import Image
src = Image.open(sys.argv[1])
def tf(p,i,j):
return tuple([256-(x-(256-i*j)/64*64)%256 for x in p])
odata = [tf(src.getpixel((j,i)),i,j) for i in range(0,256) for j in range(0,256)]
img = Image.new('RGB', (256,256))
img.putdata(odata)
img.save('2.png')
So it's basically the same as the accepted answer, but there is some small error in there somewhere..
And this is the correct python script using XOR instead of difference:
import sys
from PIL import Image
src = Image.open(sys.argv[1])
def tf(p,i,j):
return tuple([(x^i*j)%256 for x in p])
odata = [tf(src.getpixel((j,i)),i,j) for i in range(0,256) for j in range(0,256)]
img = Image.new('RGB', (256,256))
img.putdata(odata)
img.save('3.png')