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Image Doctoring Is Tough To Spot, Even When We're Looking For It
An anonymous reader writes with a link to The Stack's look at study that examines the human capacity to detect (or to overlook) manipulation in images. About 400 volunteers looked at images which had been digitally altered by erasing elements, by replicating parts the image, or by pasting in elements from other images. Less than 58 percent of the alterations were detected, even though the volunteers knew that's what they were to look for. The article says "While its conclusion – that we are not very good at identifying doctored photos – is predictable, it's the type of 'fakes' that deceive us which are most interesting." Spoiler: Erasure is much harder to spot than image splicing.
I know these sorts of articles are wildly popular these days, showing HOW DUMB ALL OF YOU OTHER PEOPLE ARE. I understand, it's very reassuring to see yourself placed in the top position where you can shit on everyone else. Thousands of years of tyrannical human elites agree with you. But you don't need everyone to see it. It just takes a single person to spot that something is wrong, point it out, and the viral internet takes over from there. That's how Tom Brokaw's fraud was exposed, someone said, "Hmm, that looks just like MS-Word" and then made the animated .gif that changed the world. Thinking that everyone needs to be a Photoshop expert is just naive and misanthropic. Reuters was also caught red-handed altering photos to conform to their narrative. It just takes one person to utter the sacred phrase "Hmm, that's funny".
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
One easy way I found to make some tidy shops is resize the image to quadruple its resolution and edit it there.
Then, when you are done, resize it back.
It smooths things together pretty nicely on a sub-pixel level that is usually undetectable even to machine-scanning techniques.
Of course, if you have the original image, it will be trivial to spot the edit regardless, but it will be harder to figure out which one is the original image.
Another I have been experimenting with is adding in grainy-looking texture from awful quality CCDs at that quad-res layer.
It is far easier to do this at the quadruple resolution because the botched noisy pixels will be enlarged quite considerably.
Now instead of nearly breaking your arm trying to be overly precise, you can easily just draw a circle and apply whatever color or filter to it. (in another layer, of course!)
Sooner or later, with smarter editing software, it is going to be damn near impossible to tell an image is edited without the original.
People in any position of power will be able to, quite literally, rewrite history. (not that this has changed anything, this has been true for thousands of years)