The tag alias #57303 ghosting -> afterimage has been approved.

Reason:

Both afterimage and ghosting have been used to describe the same concept which is movement implied by a faint, translucent or partially drawn version of object or body part in motion, usually trailing behind, or drawn to either side of a fully drawn version of that subject (see the afterimage page for a slightly better explanation).

An example - her tail is wagging, creating an afterimage
post #3112464

• afterimage is an evocative, logical tag name, the term "afterimage" is used off site to describe this visual effect in comics, cartoons, video games, and anime
• afterimages don't necessarily have to be "ghostly" or see-through as "ghosting" implies, they can be partially drawn and opaque, "afterimage" is a more accurate name than ghosting
• None of the alternative interpretations of "ghosting" suggested below are concepts that are likely to be tagged; or they're concepts that already have more obvious existing tags, "ghosting" has almost uniformly been applied to describe the exact same effect that afterimage covers

EDIT: The tag alias ghosting -> afterimage (forum #332536) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.

Isn't "ghosting" that thing when you read someone's message and don't answer?

I want to say disambiguate. post #12908, post #24371, post #57510, and post #2866287 were tagged with "ghosting" at some point but I have no idea why, and there's the concern expressed above.

gattonero2001 said:
Isn't "ghosting" that thing when you read someone's message and don't answer?

That's one use of the word, but the "ghosting" tag doesn't have a single post featuring that, as far as I can tell.

There probably isn't a need for a tag describing that and it'd hard to tag under TWYS anyways - but if there was a call for it, it'd probably be better tagged with something more descriptive like "ignoring_texts" rather than a fairly recent slang term.

lafcadio said:
I want to say disambiguate. post #12908, post #24371, post #57510, and post #2866287 were tagged with "ghosting" at some point but I have no idea why, and there's the concern expressed above.

For post #57510 and post #12908 it looks like someone was trying to figure out a tag for translucent clothing during the early days of the site. post #24371 was an immediately corrected mistag. As for post #2866287? My guess, after some Google, is that maybe they were trying to create a tag for a character doing a "ghost hit" - smoking and then breathing that smoke into another's mouth. Which doesn't even appear to be commonly called "ghosting", but that's the only thing that makes sense.

It's probably not worth taking these posts into consideration.

Ghosting is also a term referring to stalking or shadowing someone. Inconspicuously or stealthily following them to watch what they're doing without them noticing. Although I'm not seeing any uses of the tag in that context. If the vast majority of the uses of the tag meant afterimage, which seems to be the case, it looks like a good alias to me. Is it really likely people will use it to mean something else?

watsit said:
Ghosting is also a term referring to stalking or shadowing someone. Inconspicuously or stealthily following them to watch what they're doing without them noticing. Although I'm not seeing any uses of the tag in that context. If the vast majority of the uses of the tag meant afterimage, which seems to be the case, it looks like a good alias to me. Is it really likely people will use it to mean something else?

Personally, I've never heard the word used that way, and I can't find it used that way outside of a few links. In any case, we already have tags describing someone spying on another, which are more obviously named.

It's been two months, so I'll sum up everything with this bump (added to OP too)

• afterimage is an evocative, logical tag name, "afterimage(s)" is used off site to describe this visual effect in comics, cartoons, and anime
• afterimages don't necessarily have to be "ghostly" or see-through, they can be partially drawn and opaque, "afterimage" is a more accurate name than ghosting
• while "ghosting" can have a number of different interpretations, none of these interpretations are concepts that are likely to be tagged; or they're concepts that have more obvious existing tags
• "ghosting" has almost uniformly been to describe the exact same effect that afterimage covers, it hasn't been used for any number of posts describing any other concept

ghosting is diffrent from an afterimage. ghosting is caused by signal noise or imperfect display methods that makes the final image to somewhat stretched/duplicated along the horizontal (example), where as an afterimage is when an information from a previous frame is still visible, either because of the way an image is captured/displayed, or for stylistic purposes (example). (somewhat similar but not quite the same as a double exposure)

darryus said:
ghosting is diffrent from an afterimage. ghosting is caused by signal noise or imperfect display methods that makes the final image to somewhat stretched/duplicated along the horizontal (example), where as an afterimage is when an information from a previous frame is still visible, either because of the way an image is captured/displayed, or for stylistic purposes (example). (somewhat similar but not quite the same as a double exposure)

The effect in the first image would fall under chromatic aberration. The second image is what ghosting and afterimage as tags have both been used to describe.

hungrymaple said:
The effect in the first image would fall under chromatic aberration. The second image is what ghosting and afterimage as tags have both been used to describe.

that's not chromatic aberration, the entire signal is being repeated. chromatic aberration is a separate effect caused when when the color aren't synced, or because of weird optical stuff with lenses and light.

darryus said:
that's not chromatic aberration, the entire signal is being repeated. chromatic aberration is a separate effect caused when when the color aren't synced, or because of weird optical stuff with lenses and light.

I found another example and I agree , but if there is a need for a tag describing that particular effect, ghosting isn't being used for it at all, I can't find a single image under the tag that shows that kind of ghosting. It would probably be hard to find any art with that effect that wouldn't roughly fall under anaglyph, stereogram, blurred character, blurred background, motion blur or even afterimage. The only image I found under ghosting that isn't just the same as afterimage is post #3224540 and I'm not sure what you would call this.

The two terms are more or less the same concept, but afterimage is a slightly more broad concept in a way you would rarely see in drawn artwork. The two terms can be aliased together for convenience.

This is the article I used for reference for the ghosting term as it applied to HDR photography. The concept of an object appearing multiple times in a single frame.

https://www.slrlounge.com/motion-blur-vs-ghosting-the-difference-between-these-2-artifacts/

Afterimage approaches the concept from a different angle. An afterimage is an optical illusion caused by how our eyes perceive things. The most common example is the illusion that an object appears multiple times at once.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterimage

thevileone said:
The two terms are more or less the same concept, but afterimage is a slightly more broad concept in a way you would rarely see in drawn artwork. The two terms can be aliased together for convenience.

This is the article I used for reference for the ghosting term as it applied to HDR photography. The concept of an object appearing multiple times in a single frame.

https://www.slrlounge.com/motion-blur-vs-ghosting-the-difference-between-these-2-artifacts/

Afterimage approaches the concept from a different angle. An afterimage is an optical illusion caused by how our eyes perceive things. The most common example is the illusion that an object appears multiple times at once.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterimage

Maybe I'm not fully understanding your point, but I think we agree. Ghosting and Afterimage are more or less interchangeable terms both on and off site, while both can be applied to technically distinct phenomenon, if you were to talk about "afterimages" in a photo, or "ghosting after looking at a bright picture" it would be understood just as well as the reverse shown in your links.

They should be aliased, and afterimage is the better term, as it makes for a fairly self-descriptive tag, it has no baggage from slang, confusion with various obscure interpretations that are unlikely to appear in art, doesn't imply the moving object has to be "ghostly" to count, and it's used (at least informally) for the effect drawn in comic books, like this, which is covered by afterimage.

hungrymaple said:
Maybe I'm not fully understanding your point, but I think we agree. Ghosting and Afterimage are more or less interchangeable terms both on and off site, while both can be applied to technically distinct phenomenon, if you were to talk about "afterimages" in a photo, or "ghosting after looking at a bright picture" it would be understood just as well as the reverse shown in your links.

They should be aliased, and afterimage is the better term, as it makes for a fairly self-descriptive tag, it has no baggage from slang, confusion with various obscure interpretations that are unlikely to appear in art, doesn't imply the moving object has to be "ghostly" to count, and it's used (at least informally) for the effect drawn in comic books, like this, which is covered by afterimage.

Yes, we agree. It makes sense to alias the terms together as I found the term ghosting before I found the term afterimage when I was trying to find a name for this phenomenon in drawn artwork. A friend revealed to me that afterimage was a concept. My line of thinking focused on "art" terms related to motion blur, and that didn't lead me to the Wikipedia page for afterimage. To me the idea of there being copies or ghosts of an image makes intuitive sense and lead me to the term ghosting. Someone else may take the same conclusion as I did, and having ghosting point to the less intuitive term, or the opposite would be ideal.

The tag alias ghosting -> afterimage (forum #332536) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.