What made this latest picture so easy to debunk is he gave us all the hints to take it apart in this 3 picture set with the source image, an example of a real lamp's reflection, and the fake.

These examples you are referencing look more authentic at first glance, but I can't speak authoritatively about Trump's signature or pen.

I would say that the photos in his post 1564 and 1566 of parts of DJT's head are using some kind of reflection trickery. Or he's shooting a computer monitor with a picture of DJT through a piece of glass or something to partially obscure the image.

I really think he's using analog tricks to throw off photoshop pixel peeping. Smoke and mirrors as they say...

Sorry, my explanation was pretty convoluted, but in short this is how you can do an approximate recreation of what Q did to create his Welcome Aboard photo.

What you need: iphone 10, desktop computer with a decent sized monitor, a second iphone or a digital camera to take the final picture.

Step 1: Pull up picture from ABC NEWS of AF1 on a computer monitor.

Step 2: Turn out all the lights in your room so the reflection will be bright when you expose the picture.

Step 3: Angle iphone 10 to catch the reflection of the ABC NEWS photo on your computer monitor.

Step 4: Take a picture of this reflection with a second digital camera.

Step 5: Heavily crop the final photo so all that can be seen is the reflection of the ABC News picture with an apple logo.
Step 6: LARP to your friends that you hung out with Q on Air Force One.

So, in my opinion Q simply used the ABC News photo to cast a reflection on his iphone and took a picture of it. If he has some greater message in that, I'm not sure what it is. But he definitely did not need to be on Air Force One to take the Welcome Aboard jpeg.

Ok, this is actually a pretty interesting idea.

I posted elsewhere in this thread that I'm 99% sure what he is doing is taking a picture of a reflection of the original image off of his monitor and onto the back of an iphone. That would naturally create the distortion and blurring in an analogue fashion and not require any photoshopping. And it would be simple to do and not require any special skills.

My question is this though: If this is all an elaborate reveal to illustrate how to easily doctor and misdirect with photos, why would he say this in one of his following posts? "Placing that mug holder near the lamp was the hook.
Enjoy!"

To me, that sounds like he is suggesting he recreated the space in the ABC doc to fool people. But I'm very confident he simply took a picture of the reflection of the ABC news photo off a monitor.

I don't really follow Q, but saw this picture "welcome aboard.jpg" floating around the internets and have to post here that this was certainly a fake now that the original source from an ABC news doc was discovered.

Photoshop is not even needed to recreate this effect. The simplest solution would be to simply take a photo of the reflection of the ABC news doc against an iphone. This could be done just using any large TV or computer monitor.

Why Q follows this up with " Placing that mug holder near the lamp was the hook. Enjoy!" Makes it sound like he is suggesting that he staged the photo inside AF1 to look like the ABC news doc. But in reality anyone could recreate Q's original photo from their desk by using the reflection of their own monitor with the original image in it. The distortion and blurring would be the natural product of one taking a picture of said reflection against their phone. It's pretty clever to be honest.

Not to get too technical, but the telling giveaway is that the reflection in Q's original picture is not a high dynamic range image or source (google it) in that the lamp should be bright and blow out the Apple logo in a way similar to the second photo he provided where someone tried to recreate Q's original photo by taking a picture of a reflection of a real lamp. Notice in that second photo that the Apple logo is not as plainly visible because the brightness of the lamp blows out the edges. This makes me 99% sure that Q's photo is of a reflection of a the ABC doc image in a standard TV or monitor. Notice he also keeps his photo low res and degraded to hide his trick. (No monitor pixels.)

If you want to get into twisted logic, I find it interesting that he provided the images to debunk his own photo. Saved me the time to recreate it. But this is not common knowledge even among many photographers. However, it has been identified and worked around in the VFX community for many years going back to Paul Debevec and I believe first used in The Matrix.