![]() Let’s look at a famous photograph that has had conspiracy theorists whispering for decades. While it may never be possible to authenticate a photograph to 100% confidence, forensics specialists can test photos using a number of techniques. Photographic forensics uses a battery of techniques and algorithms to identify fake photos, many of which examine whether images fit with the laws of physics. The solution is to turn to computers to spot the inconsistencies that humans can miss. So people are both ignorant and confident, which is the worst combination.” “More often than not, people think that the real images are fake and that things that are fake are real,” says Farid. When I took it, I guessed correctly 15 out of 25 times, or about 60% of the time. If you’re curious about your ability to spot the difference between real images and those that have been Photoshopped, Adobe has put together a little online quiz. People will suspect it’s fake, but you shouldn’t assume that’s the case.” For example, maybe the image was saturated, maybe there was a strange flash, maybe a piece of dust on the lens. “A lot of things can happen with an image that can leave artefacts and create something very visually striking. “All my research has informed me to conclude that I can’t tell (them) by examining a photo visually,” he says. Victor Schetinger, a doctoral candidate who worked on the study, says friends and colleagues regularly ask him about the legitimacy of photos. Participants were only able to spot the fakes about 47% of the time. While some of them were not altered in any way, more than half had been spliced (meaning that they were a composite of multiple photos), had areas that had been erased, or contained areas that were copied and pasted from the same image. In one study conducted at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, for example, participants were presented with a series of photos and asked if they had been manipulated. It later turned out to be a composite made from two different images.Įven if we are sceptical of the source of an image, we are still bad at eye-balling inconsistencies. They might create these crowds to add diversity so the candidate doesn’t look like a racist, or use composites to show their opponents in a negative light.”įor example, when a picture was “unearthed” during the 2004 presidential election showing then candidate and Vietnam war veteran John Kerry sitting next to Jane Fonda at an anti-war rally in 1970, at least one prominent newspaper referred to the image, which spread across the internet. “Images will be manipulated to make a candidate look better. “There isn’t an election that goes by where you don’t see fake photographs in one form or another,” says Farid. In today’s world, fake images have implications for everything from politics to medicine. If they do not, then something has been doctored. Again, by tracing a line from the person or object creating the reflection and their mirror image, they should all converge at a single point somewhere behind the reflective surface. Similarly, reflections like those in the image at the start of this article are also a giveaway. ![]() He has shown it is possible with this method to identify images that have had objects or people added after they were taken. If a photo has been tampered with, the shadows of some objects in the image may not match the light sources in the rest of the picture, says Farid. If you map out several points on a shadow, the lines should intersect. If you draw a line from the edge of a shadow in a photograph, to a point on the object that is casting the shadow, you can trace that further to reveal where the light in an image is coming from. Some other types of fake are easier to spot, like this Time magazine cover that was found displayed in the US President's golf clubs (Credit: Washington Post/Twitter) As the chair of computer science at Dartmouth College, he has been studying how to spot photographs that have been manipulated for decades. ![]() “If the light is coming from the front, you won’t see the red in the ear.”īut Farid also has some more scientific tools at his disposal. “If the Sun is behind me, my ears will look red from the front because you’ll see the blood,” he says. If these properties of the light source are not consistent, then the photo may be a composite.”Īnother giveaway is the colour of people’s ears. “The location, size, and colour of this reflection tells us about the location, size, and colour of the light source. “If you have two people standing next to each other in a photograph, then we will often see the reflection of the light source (such as the Sun or a camera flash) in their eyes,” he explains. One trick he has picked up over time is to check the points of light in people’s eyes. ![]()
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