imagemanipulation

Adobe Using AI to Spot Photoshopped Photos

Adobe's software has been widely used for many years now as a tool to create fake photos, but now the company is developing software for the other side: it's using AI to spot photo manipulations to aid in the war against fake photos.

What Famous People Look Like When 50 Portraits of Them Are Averaged

What do you get when you combine 50 portraits of the same famous face and averaged the result? Reddit user Dwainosaur dared to not only ask the question but to pursue it. He gathered up a large collection of photos and wrote a script for averaging the results. Subjects include Brad Pitt, Jack Black, Billy Murray, and Barack Obama. Infamous faces include Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

Using Noise as Camera Fingerprints for Detecting Image Manipulation

A recent photographic analysis technique developed by Professor Siwei Lyu and his team at the University at Albany - SUNY could lead to better forensic analysis of altered images. The technique takes advantage of the fact that, when splicing two images together, each will bring with it the specific noise pattern of the camera it was shot with.

So, when analyzing the obviously fake image at the top, the flamingo Tiger Woods is using in lieu of his golf club shows up as having a different noise pattern than the rest of the image.

New Software Suite to Detect Stealthy Image Manipulation

Former Photoshop product manager Kevin Connor and Dartmouth professor (and digital forensic expert) Hany Farid are working together to help put a stop to image manipulation where it doesn't belong. Putting their two brains together they formed a company called Fourandsix, which is primed to release a full suite of software tools that will help law enforcement officers, photo editors and other interested parties detect secret digital photo manipulation.

Dad Photoshops Family Trip Photos to Convince His Kids that Ewoks Exist

It's a big no-no when newspapers or photographers manipulate photos to alter reality, but when a father playfully does it to mess with his kids there's a big potential for awesome. Graphic designer Anthony Herrera recently did just that, and his story is now making the rounds on the Internet:

A year ago we took a trip to Sequoia National Park. I wanted to excite my daughter while being in such amazing surroundings. Being the Star Wars geek that I am (so is she), I told her that this is where the Ewoks live. She spent a good chunk of our time hiking keeping a lookout for any Ewoks. Coming home I can't say that she wasn't disappointed that we didn't find any. I had to explain that they are extremely shy and hardly ever let anyone see them. After we got home, and after I had a little time alone with the photos, I told her I thought I saw something strange in a few pictures. We viewed them on the TV to get a larger image. You can imagine how surprised and excited she was when we discovered that we didn't see any Ewoks, but they saw us, and had certainly taken an interest in her and her little brother. Maybe I'm a little wrong for lying to her and falsifying the pictures, but I don't care. She'll never forget the time she spent in the big woods with Ewoks.