Identifying Manipulated Images

[macavity]

Thought the following article might be of interest:

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20423/?a=f

Photo-editing software gets more sophisticated all the time, allowing users to alter pictures in ways both fun and fraudulent. Last month, for example, a photo of Tibetan antelope roaming alongside a high-speed train was revealed to be a fake, according to the Wall Street Journal, after having been published by China's state-run news agency. Researchers are working on a variety of digital forensics tools, including those that analyze the lighting in an image, in hopes of making it easier to catch such manipulations...

 

[pixelsmith]

i would like to use that software on this image. i am fairly certain it is faked but still not 100% certain. it was brought to me by a local surgeon who said he was taking a picture of the bridge (cropped out to reduce file size) and thing popped up out of the water then submerged and took off like a fish in shallow water. he said the part visible was about 2-3 feet in diameter and stuck up out of the water about 2 feet.
[attachment=139]

 

[Rick Deckard]

i would like to use that software on this image. i am fairly certain it is faked but still not 100% certain. it was brought to me by a local surgeon who said he was taking a picture of the bridge (cropped out to reduce file size) and thing popped up out of the water then submerged and took off like a fish in shallow water. he said the part visible was about 2-3 feet in diameter and stuck up out of the water about 2 feet.

My question is - even if you could authenticate the picture, what does it tell you?

For what it's worth, it looks like a chunk of concrete perhaps wedged on another piece of concrete that's lying flat on the river-bed.

When I go walking, I often pass shallow streams and ponds which do have lot's of half-submerged junk visible above the water-line - if I took a picture of some of these things, I'm sure I could create a story to support the idea that they're not 'what they seem'...

...just an observation.

 

[Rick Deckard]

If it's fake, my guess is someone pasted in a picture of a Mud Skipper...

...the easiest way to achieve it would be to throw a large stone into a pond, take some snaps of the ripples and then 'paste in' an up-scaled image (with an inverted reflection).

 

[pixelsmith]

it does look like a mudskipper. it would have to be about 12 feet long if real. the water in that spot is about 4 feet deep. i wonder if the good doc was playing with photoshop.