The Hidden signs that can reveal a Fake Photo

A picture may say a thousand words, but what if the photograph has been fabricated? There are ways to spot a fake – you just have to look closely enough.

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Two men exchanging some documents outside? Not necessarily (Credit: James O’Brien and Hany Farid)

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1. The tell-tale signs may not jump out at you, but to Hany Farid, the image is littered with evidence – one of the reflections in the window is misaligned and the shadows do not line up.
2. This photograph is a fake. One of the men was not there at all.
3. Research suggests that regardless of what you might think about your own abilities to spot a hoax, most of us are pretty bad at it. Farid, however, looks at photographs in a different way to most people. As a leading expert in digital forensics and image analysis, he scrutinises them for the almost imperceptible signs that suggest an image has been manipulated.

One trick he has picked up over time is to check the points of light in people’s eyes. “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. “The location, size, and colour of this reflection tells us about the location, size, and colour of the light source. If these properties of the light source are not consistent, then the photo may be a composite.”

Another giveaway is the colour of people’s ears. “If the Sun is behind me, my ears will look red from the front because you’ll see the blood,” he says. “If the light is coming from the front, you won’t see the red in the ear.”But Farid also has some more scientific tools at his disposal. As the chair of computer science at Dartmouth College, he has been studying how to spot photographs that have been manipulated for decades.

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

Sources: BBC NEWS