The New York Times reminds us that seeing may not be believing.
Kate Hafner writes (excerpt):
Faked photos are nothing new. Even with film and negatives, it was possible, with the right darkroom equipment and some skill and creativity, to remove people from images, for example, or to combine a jackrabbit and an antelope to create a gag “jackalope” postcard. Nor is photography for political purposes new. In 1840, Hippolyte Bayard, one of the earliest photographers, staged a picture of himself as a drowned man because he thought his work was not given proper recognition by the French government.
“But the scale of faking and manipulating is so much greater now in the environment of the pixel, which invites alteration,” said Fred Ritchin, the author of “In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography” (Aperture, 1999).
Adobe Systems, which makes Photoshop, says there are about 5 million registered users of the various professional and consumer versions of its software, including Photoshop Elements 2.0, which costs $99. Similar programs, like Paint Shop Pro and Microsoft Digital Image Suite, are widely available. And many computers, digital cameras, scanners and printers now include free image-editing software.
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Mr. Mikkelson said he believed that over the years people have grown more skeptical of the images they see. “It’s a lot harder to fool people,” he said. “The tools are improving, but the skills to convincingly doctor photos are scarcer than people think.”
While it is relatively easy to cut a portion out of one photo and paste it into another, doing it in a seamless way is more difficult. Often it is easy to spot differences in lighting, perspective or contrast between different areas of an image, or to detect background that has been duplicated to fill in part of an image that has been removed.