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Slideshow: A Tour of Photo Tampering

Doctoring photos for nefarious purposes

11 Aug 2009

PRESIDENTIAL POSE: This iconic portrait of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln [left] is actually a composite of Lincoln’s head and the body of Southern politician John Calhoun [right], an advocate of slavery. The image was most likely created years after Calhoun’s death in 1850.
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LEADING MAN: To create a more heroic portrait of himself, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini ordered the horse handler removed from the original 1942 photograph [right].
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COVER UP: O.J. Simpson’s 1994 mug shot following his arrest for murder was digitally darkened on Time’s cover, but not on Newsweek’s. Time apologized and issued a replacement cover but claimed the intent wasn’t racist.
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SMOKED OUT: The cover of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album showed Paul McCartney holding a cigarette [right]. In a later version of the photograph that appeared on posters in the United States, the cigarette was airbrushed out. The change was apparently made without the permission of either McCartney or Apple Records.
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PARTLY CLOUDY: In this Reuters photo from August 2006 [left], thick black smoke rises above the capital of Lebanon after an Israeli air raid. But in the original [right], the smoke is neither as thick nor as black. Reuters subsequently removed all of photographer Adnan Hajj’s work from its Web site.
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JUMP SHOT: Players on the University of Toledo and Kent State women’s basketball teams reach for the ball [left]. But there was no ball: Toledo Blade photographer Allan Detrich added it. From January 2007 until his resignation in April 2007, Dietrich submitted 947 photos, of which 79 were altered.
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THE SKINNY: CBS’s in-house magazine Watch! put TV anchorwoman Katie Couric on a digital diet, to judge from these before [right] and after [left] photos. A CBS spokesman said the doctored image was the work of a photo department employee who “got a little zealous.”
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POIGNÉES D’AMOUR: That’s French for “love handles.” Nicolas Sarkozy has ‘em, but you’d never know it from a 2007 photo of the shirtless French president [left] that appeared in the French magazine Paris Match, in which his flab has been airbrushed away.
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TIGER TALE: Zhou Zhenglong claimed to have taken 71 photographs of the almost extinct South China tiger [left] and subsequently received a 20 000 yuan reward for his find. The photos, though, were fake; most likely Zhou cropped the tiger’s image from a poster [right].
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MEMORY LANE: Psychologists have found that memories can be altered by viewing doctored images. Shown a photo of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest to which large crowds were added [left], people recalled the event as larger and more violent than did those shown the original photo [right].
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ROCKET DUSTUP: A July 2008 photo [left] shows four Iranian missiles streaking skyward. But only three of those rockets actually left the ground [right]; a fourth was digitally added. Observers pointed out that portions of the faked rocket’s exhaust plume and dust cloud had obviously been duplicated from its neighbors’.
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SWIMSUIT ADDITION: Just after Sarah Palin’s selection as the U.S. Republican vice presidential candidate, a photo of a bikini-clad, gun-toting Palin blitzed across the Internet [left]. It was quickly revealed as a hoax, created by splicing an image of the Alaska governor’s head onto someone else’s body [right].
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MEN’S ROOM: Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and President Shimon Peres pose with members of the Israeli cabinet. But in the version that appeared in the ultra-orthodox newspaper Yated Neeman [left], two female cabinet members had been digitally replaced with men, reportedly because the newspaper considers it immodest to print images of women.
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type:slideshow photoshop digital photo forensics digital photo tampering computer forensics software

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