Photos you thought were real

Damian Koh | Feb 02, 2006

Healing facial blemishes with Photoshop is common, especially if you have an ugly zit on special occasions. However, we're not talking about merely duplicating neighboring pixels or airbrushing your photo, but painting in new backgrounds on negatives. Photo manipulation is a lot more common than you think, according to L. Frank Kenney, an analyst at Gartner.

Enter Hany Farid, a Dartmouth College professor who hopes have a beta version of his software out in the next six months. Good news is it will be made freely available under an open source license.

Software that is used in fraud detection searches for photographic anomalies that the human brain ignores or cannot identify. According to Farid, "there are statistical correlations that don't occur naturally" and changes in photos can be quantified from a mathematical and statistical perspective.

Soon, you'll be able to find out if the item you're bidding for on eBay is for real.

Pictures that lie.
Sieving out the real from the fake.