I'm relatively new here, but I'm certainly not new to debunking wild claims. Some quick suggestions and thoughts:
First of all, if you are just starting out, I'd personally be careful about using the word
debunking in a general sense for what a critical thinker does when presented with a wild claim (which can take the form of a picture or video). You are absolutely challenging that claim and testing to see whether or not it is internally consistent, and whether or not it shows obvious signs of fakery or can be explained by mundane phenomena. But IMO you
shouldn't have the mindset that everything can be explained or that everything exotic looking is definitely 'fake' in the sense that someone has fabricated it; that will create a lot of bias in terms of your thinking. You'll notice that folks like Mick tend to use the word 'probably' a lot, and rarely reach definitive conclusions except in cases where a smorgasbord of overlapping and mutually supporting evidence can be found that neatly fit the observed phenomena.
For example, I consider the Chilean Navy's UFO video fairly definitively
solved, because there is so much conclusive evidence that it's just a distant airplane that alternative explanations are simply implausible at this point. I mean it
could be an alien spaceship acting
exactly like a known commercial flight, but..
For other stuff, what you'll find is that skeptics tend to debunk individual
claims. For instance, we still don't really know what the 'objects' in the
gofast or
gimbal videos are. They're
probably something mundane but there simply isn't enough evidence in the videos to positively identify them. But the community here has, in my opinion, done a pretty good job of debunking the individual
claims made by breathless promoters of the idea that these are exotic craft
. Whatever is in those videos is almost certainly not:
- Surrounded by a space-time distorting aura
- Making physics-defying sudden moves or displaying startling acceleration
- Moving at hypersonic speed
- Rotating
Etc. Even those conclusions are stated with a relative degree of confidence, and that confidence scales in proportion to how closely the observed phenomena match observations of mundane phenomena in plausibly similar circumstances.
To paraphrase Arthur Conan Doyle:
once you have eliminated the impossible.. actually that's about it.
After a few decades of reading about conspiracy theories and watching thoughtful, critical people shoot them full of holes, I can confidently say that the best tools I've seen for analysis of photos and videos are attention to detail and domain-specific knowledge. You can't buy that from Adobe.
Consider the requisite tools used to debunk a bunch of the sensational photographs or videos that have recently passed through here and other skeptic forums:
- Knowledge of how phone cameras can be subject to internal reflection
- Knowledge of how image stabilization can cause apparent motion relative to stationary objects in a field of view
- Understanding how objects can be measured at a known distance using a starting FoV value
- Trigonometry. Seriously. Trig.
- Finding pictures that show similar features and have well known mundane explanations ('spotlight throwing shadow of tower against low-lying clouds')
- Finding pictures on the Internet containing elements that were obviously re-used to fake the picture or footage
- Knowing what satellites look like. Recently, knowing what StarLink looks like
- Knowing what lenses with bladed apertures do to out-of-focus light
- Noting or inferring date/time information and using the positions of stars observed in the video to infer that it was filmed under a heap of commercial air traffic
Other types of photo or video forensics rely on a good understanding of how image or video creation software works, and just plain old attention to detail:
- Spotting inconsistent shadow directions, or inconsistent colour palettes
- Noticing that elements in videos move according to a pattern consistent with key frame interpolation (e.g.: easy ease)
- Recognizing the consistency of stock media generators (e.g.: suspiciously consistent atmosphere distortion on a close-up video of the moon)
- Noticing glitches where fakers just plain messed up-- they forgot to mat something out, or an object vanishes for a frame, or stops suddenly because the faker forgot to extend an automation track through an entire video project
Etc.