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Scientific Publication Condemns Photo-Manipulation
valdean writes "According to a recent article in the New York Times (registration and short biography required) scientific journals have begun to respond to a growing problem of photo-manipulation in submitted manuscripts. At The Journal of Cell Biology, a test developed in 2002 revealed that 25 percent of all accepted manuscripts had one or more illustrations that were manipulated to the point of violating the journal's guidelines. Examples included the duplication of images for re-presentation as a control experiment, making pictures prettier with the clone stamp tool, use of the contrast tool to hide data, and merging portions of several images so that they appear to be a single image. How were many of these scientists caught? They submitted layered Adobe Photoshop files that showed exactly what they had done."
I don't know much about imaging techniques. But how easy is it to tell a picture's been manipulated without having the original source in hand?
Developers: We can use your help.
Ctrl+E or Layer -> Merge Layers is so difficult these days...
NeoThermic
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
Didn't have to register or nuthin'. I even went to the main page and checked other articles... all viewable. Glad to see they've abandoned their all or nothing policies. Though I use adblock, I left all ads intact. Nice to see that the NY Times have finally listened to the masses, and removed the requirement to register, when you view most content.
If they submitted multi-layed photoshop files, most of them probably were not concerned with getting caught. So they must not have thought what they were doing was unethical. And having the journal come up with some guidelines and a review process for images is hardly going to make a difference.
The problem is the attitude. If they think that modifying these images isn't unetherical, then how about the data? And how will you ever catch those people? It's just a sad state of affairs in this scientific community.
You're smoking something, it still requires reg to view.
Unless I'm mistaken, the article never states that the scientists submitted layered Photoshop images that revealed their misdeeds. I find it very unlikely that a journal would ever accept an image in photoshop format -- they usually want press-ready formats like PDF, EPS, or JPG.
From the article, it sounds like the editors just fool around with brightness and contrast of submitted images, and that often reveals the discontinuities from an edit. However, the specifics are not in the article, so don't jump to conclusions.
My guess is, you either used bugmenot at some point in the past and forgot about it, or someone's been using your computer (and profile.) Either way, there's a cookie on your computer that NYT likes.
Photoshopping germs to look better for journals couldn't be any worse than photoshopping models to look better for magazine covers.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Is there a systemic pattern of doctored photographs coming out of South Korea and China?
Indentifying the culture and ethnicity of the cheats may be difficult. One approximation is to classify the incidents of doctored photographs by the last name of the author. For example, do people with Korean or Chinese surnames submit a disproportionate share of doctored photographs?
Nope, I'm not using bugmenot, nor have I ever registered. The links still exist in the top right to register or login. Bizarre...
Not because it exposed people who were fast and loose with their photos but because it brings up the whole issue of digital photo manipulation for entries. I recently submitted two photos for a local photo contest which were done from film.
When it came time to see the submitted photos I took my parents along so they could see how my prints stacked up to the others.
Of the roughly 30 prints that were submitted there were at least two I was sure had been manipulated and possibly one more. The one case was blatant. The submitter had done a poor cut and paste of a wood duck. The other was the merging of two photos which produced a very nice looking picture.
As more and more people use digital cameras and then PhotoShop (or other programs) the 'art' of photography goes away since the original photo can so easily be manipulated. Unlike in traditional photography where the negative or slide is the original and any manipulation of that original can be easily seen.
Personally I would like to see photo contests have two separate categories. One for film cameras and one for digital with the understanding that the digital photo may have been manipulated in a way beyond what traditional photos can be. Like the article I'm not talking about enhancing contrast since that can be done with different paper or chemical process for film photos but rather the addition or subtraction of wholesale items.
Yes, adding and removing objects from a film photo can be done but it is more labor-intensive and harder to pull off than with a photo manipulation program.
Granted, if people would just be honest about what they submit we wouldn't have to have this discussion but the same could be said about laws or notices to not do something.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
they meant the brush tool.
...I'll get me coat.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
The actual article is a bit more nuanced:
If a researcher manipulates only part of an image then the researcher is implicitly admitting that there was something in the image that they chose to ignore. On the other hand, if a researcher changes the contrast of the whole image to make it easier to see the patterns they are drawing their conclusions from, then they can always claim they really didn't notice the other stuff. Essentially, researchers have to avoid doing things that prove that they were deliberately dishonest.
A retouched microscope shot would erase critical data such as molecule clusters, etc. A scientific journal must not allow this. In other words, magazine girls are NOT used as basis for developing new medical treatments that might heal or kill someone.
Geeze! I mean, ok, science editors aren't always "normal" people, but paranormal? You don't have to rub it in!
Always flatten your images before submitting them.
(OK, not really, but you know some people of less-than-sterling ethics are going to walk away with that instead of the real lesson, i.e. don't fudge your data.)
I think a possible solution is to have an invisible watermark like what could be done steganographically. The photo industry could repsond by making cameras that encode a stego watermark on some or all of their cameras. A journal could require that 1. submissions require stego watermarks. and 2. Annotations be provided in a separate layer that can be overlaid at press time.
Unfortunately, I can think of ways to get around this like rephotographing a manipulated image so I don't think you could stop a determined "attacker", but you could easily stop the run-of-the mill dishonesty.
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Popular Science did an article on this very issue. I believe there's a gentlemen working on mathmatical means to detecting manipulation (no, not watermarking).
All photographs are manipulations. None capture the exact data represented by the obect in real life.
Before photographing the item it lit, framed, lensed, exposed, and captured at a point in time. Plenty of room for manipulation.
So what's the difference between physical manipulation before the capture and digital manipulation after?
There is only honesty and dishonesty. Manipulation is a given.
You can mod me down, but you cannot call me a coward.
Altered photos are a good thing IF they are clearly labeled as "photo-illustration," "enhanced photograph," "composite photograph," or the like, with the original photos made available to the publisher and the peer reviewers or better yet to the general readership.
When studying a scientific photo, I don't want to be distracted by less-interesting bits of information - I want my attention drawn to the point the author is trying to make.
You only have a problem if the reader thinks he is looking at one thing when in fact he is looking at something else.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
as insurance stops covering more and more procedures, the X-rays get touched up rather than the operation gets scheduled. when peer review and editor review finds these things, they ought to alternate-page the publications... left side, the author's stuff, right page, the evidence discovered that, ahhhh, suggests a lack of evidentiary demonstration and perspicacity on the part of the authors. (because none dare call it fraud and weaselness.)
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
New news in the scientific community, but very old news in the news community. You can never believe any picture you see in the news media. Here's a recent example: http://michellemalkin.com/archives/003780.htm . The media (both big and small) have been repeated caught photoshopping their images. One of the great advantages of the blogosphere is that this sort of stuff gets found out very quickly.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
In microscopes I have used (of the electron and scanning probe variety), often automatic image processing is used when you save an image. We've had to be very careful to make sure that we have disabled anything we can, and in some cases, have had to scrap software and write our own to make sure we weren't losing data.
Really, the problem is that there isn't room in a scientific paper to put dozens of images proving your point. When you're given 3 pages, you select the best image or two that you have. Ultimately, an editor or reviewer can ask for supplemental information if there is any doubt in the result. Perhaps the problem is that reviewers aren't asking to see (or people are not providing) the supplimental data which a good scientist uses to determine truth.
I shoot mostly with a Canon EOS 20D digital SLR (the 1.6x sensor crop and smaller pixel pitch it great for extending your telephoto shots). Anyway, there is a "custom function" (i.e. a user-configurable parameter) in the camera (and all high-end Canon dSLRs) that enables "image verification". It basically digitally signs the original image, and then with the $700 Canon DVK-E2 Data Verification Kit, you can verify the signature. Apparently, this is used a lot in the insurance fields.
;)
Now, when it'll come to your little point-and-shoot...
For quite a while, we've had three categories. Black and white, color, and "digitally manipulated" (i.e. doing creative things with Photoshop, etc). Strangely, there are very few entries in the manipulated category, which I suppose shows that we've got mainly traditionalists in our group, but hey.
I entered a time-composite of over about 90 minutes at dawn. The left edge was half an hour before sunrise, the right edge was an hour after sunrise, and by dissolving through about 30 frames, I created an even time-gradient across the shot. Sadly, I didn't win that contest because it apparently looked too natural (almost like a storm front blowing in) -- the judges went for the garish "spin/zoom-filter" style of Photoshopping over my subtle and non-headache-inducing masterpiece (okay, it wasn't a masterpiece, but amateurpiece isn't a word).
Anyway, if even my 90-minute, 30-frame composite could pass without question for most people, I imagine you *could* get away with a lot. (Then again, so did all the classic darkroom vets.)
> As more and more people use digital cameras and then PhotoShop (or other programs) the 'art' of photography goes away
:)
Ok, so it was a little before my time, but I seem to remember hearing that the whole idea that photography could even be an art form was rejected at first, especially by painters. Frankly, while I'm willing to concede that photography most certainly can be art, it seems to me that digital image manipulation provides at least as much, and possibly far more, room for artistic expression.
Seems to me like there's a bit of poetic justice here. (Is poetic justice a form of art?) I bet there's a bunch of dead painters who would (if they could) be rolling around laughing at the irony of a photographer complaining about people who take advantage of technology to make their art "too easily".
...for the need to have media like film. It's alot harder to manipulate a piece of film than it is an image file. Sad to see film seems to be on the way out.
Oops, how did this get here?
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Sharpening up images is one thing if it's needed to highlite a point (but in a scientific journal, there needs to be text explaining the manipulation).
However, if there are major manipulations to an image that border fraud, one has to wonder how many of the numbers are pretend.
That really was bigfoot in the photo.
"the 'art' of photography goes away since the original photo can so easily be manipulated. Unlike in traditional photography where the negative or slide is the original and any manipulation of that original can be easily seen."
A good part of the "art' of photography has always been in the processing of the print! For instance a lot of Wedding photographers still use film because they have labs that can process the film just right. All you need to do is take some professional negatives and have them developed at your local drugstore and compare the two.
The only real difference is that photoshop pushes down the cost of entry. It changes the skill set required but doesn't take away the "art'.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Today Adobe releases the 10-th release of its popular program "Photoshop". The hit feature in this release is that the software maker has forbidden all sort of image manipulation, answering concerns from the scientific community:
"There were numerous reports about photo manipulation in manuscripts from the scientific community. Few years back, when the government asked us to forbid opening images with scanned banknotes in them due to possibility for money conterfeiting, we responded and implemented the appropriate algorithms to comply. With this release, we're just taking the next step."
Among the features unaffected in Photoshop 10 remain zooming in/out and panning.
According to Adobe, Photoshop 10 will be available to purchase at retailers world-wide early next month.
One of the great advantages of the blogosphere is that this sort of stuff gets found out very quickly.
And one of the great disadvantages to the blogosphere is that it's called the blogosphere.
that does sound really interesting; now could you pause, take calming deep breaths, and repeat in English for the rest of us
GrimRC
You can never believe any picture you see in the news media.
And sometimes it's more blatant than Photoshopping. An Agence France-Presse journalist used a fisheye lens to exaggerate damage done to a terrorist's house by the IDF. Here's my JE about it.
They generally show up as very low or very high frequency noise distributed more or less uniformly around the origin.
...distributed around the origin?" (Origin = 0hz, right)? Amplitude plots of images in the freq domain will always be symmetric since the 'input' is 'real'.
What exactly do you mean by "high freq. noise
I thought most un-altered images would have strong low-frequency components (as the image is likely to have some "average" intensity that is non-zero). Perhaps the lack of high-frequency noise in a specific (non-white) area could indicate re-touching/blurring since photographs often have a little thermal and/or quantizaion noise in them.
You see? Those EVIL SCIENTISTS are committing fraud left and right with their evil "Photo shops"! Therefore, you are left with no choice but to admit that God created the world 6,000 years ago in six literal days!!11!1111</fundie>
(Note to moderators: The above is SATIRE)
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
The last two lines of the article:
Layered Photoshop files contain a history of the file.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Whoops. That's not a feature of Photoshop. I was thinking of my last job's product which handled satellite and aerial photography.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").