The Camera Never Lies, But the Software Can

By KATIE HAFNER; TIM GNATEK CONTRIBUTED REPORTING FOR THIS ARTICLE.
Published: March 11, 2004, New York Times

WHEN John Knoll created Photoshop in 1989, he knew he was designing an image-editing program that could be used in good ways and bad. But even Mr. Knoll, who wrote the software with his brother, Tom, was unprepared for how outlandish photo manipulation would become. "When we worked on it, mostly we saw the possibilities, the cool things," said Mr. Knoll, 41. "Not how it would be abused."

The same tools that can be used to crop, retouch and otherwise edit digital images can be used just as easily to distort, alter and fabricate them. With Photoshop and similar programs now widely available in inexpensive, easy-to-use consumer versions, just about anyone with rudimentary computer skills can cut, paste, erase, combine and retouch photographs. It doesn't take much skill to make the unreal seem real.

"Once this kind of technology was only available to people who could spend $1,000 on software," said Mr. Knoll, who now works for Industrial Light and Magic, the special effects company. "Now it's available to everyone, even those who want to use it for slander."

Playing with and circulating digital images has become something of a national pastime, the visual equivalent of e-mailed jokes. Family photos are frequent fodder, and the Web teems with sight gags and fakes: a shark attacking a British Navy diver as he escapes up a ladder to a helicopter; northeastern North America in complete darkness after the August blackout; a "triple tornado" accompanying Hurricane Lili, which hit Louisiana in October 2002.

But not all digitally altered images are innocuous. A malicious one surfaced last month, when two photographs taken a year apart began circulating on the Web as one. The composite, which carried a false Associated Press credit, purported to show John Kerry and Jane Fonda, known for her stance against the Vietnam War, sharing a speaker's platform at a 1971 antiwar rally.

Conservative groups circulated the manipulated photo for several days, and it appeared in several publications before it was revealed to be a fake, apparently stitched together by someone opposed to Mr. Kerry's presidential run.

Faked photos are nothing new. Even with film and negatives, it was possible, with the right darkroom equipment and some skill and creativity, to remove people from images, for example, or to combine a jackrabbit and an antelope to create a gag "jackalope" postcard. Nor is photography for political purposes new. In 1840, Hippolyte Bayard, one of the earliest photographers, staged a picture of himself as a drowned man because he thought his work was not given proper recognition by the French government.

"But the scale of faking and manipulating is so much greater now in the environment of the pixel, which invites alteration," said Fred Ritchin, the author of "In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography" (Aperture, 1999).

Adobe Systems, which makes Photoshop, says there are about 5 million registered users of the various professional and consumer versions of its software, including Photoshop Elements 2.0, which costs $99. Similar programs, like Paint Shop Pro and Microsoft Digital Image Suite, are widely available. And many computers, digital cameras, scanners and printers now include free image-editing software.

Many doctored photos are just funny, like the one of a man hoisting what appears to be a 90-pound cat. But David Mikkelson, who with his wife, Barbara, runs Snopes.com, an online repository and debunker of urban legends and hoaxes, including some composite photos, said that sometimes fake images strike a chord because they reflect a certain reality. "People are making caricatures based on existing conceptions," he said. "This helps them spread far and wide."

Such was the case with a manipulated photo that appeared on the Web in 2002 that showed President Bush holding a book upside down during a visit with children in Houston. The imag