Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Perhaps you misunderstand. This is "clearly photoshoped" in the sense of

> http://xkcd.com/331/

> This is a real photograph, and yet, for some reason, it "looks wrong". 

  More seriously, though, nowadays it's very difficult to judge any
photo to decide whether it's genuine or not.

  Perhaps a bit sadly, some people have got way *too* wary of any kind
of photo which contains anything out of ordinary. Many real (and sometimes
amazing) photographs are dismissed as fakes, often with no evidence of
fakery whatsoever (other than "it's too amazing to be true").

  A few doubters will try to point out discrepancies and flaws in the
image (cause by image manipulation), but as we know from the Moon hoax
conspiracy theorists, if you really want to see flaws in a photo, you
will find them completely regardless of whether the photo is genuine
or not. It's a kind of self-fulfilling goal.

  Sometimes some genuine photos just happen to contain characteristics
which are very deceptive.

  As a fictional example, think about a photo of a closeup of a person
in the foreground, against some eg. outdoors background (eg. on a street
or whatever). It may just happen that the person in the foreground is
clearly illuminated from the left, casting fuzzy shadows to the right,
while on the background everything is clearly illuminated from the right,
casting sharp shadows to the left.

  A doubter could point this out and say that the person has very clearly
been pasted onto the background afterwards. And the argument might sound
pretty convincing.

  However, that doesn't have to be true. It may happen that, for example,
the person is actually standing in the shadow of some (off-image) building
(and the shadow of the building is also off-image), and is being illuminated
by light reflected on an (also off-image) white wall nearby, making it
look like the person is illuminated completely differently than the
background.

  Even outdoors illumination doesn't always have to match perfectly in
all parts of a photo. Shadows and reflected light can create tons of
tricks which then doubters can claim are signs of image manipulation.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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