manipulated

Today my mother-in-law texted me to say, "Can't trust any photo." Why? Kate Middleton.

The Princess of Wales Kate Middleton has apologized after admitting to editing a family portrait that has been pulled by major news agencies.

Earlier today, Microsoft announced two new tools that will help identify manipulated photos and videos. The first is a metadata-based system, and the second is a "Video Authenticator" that will analyze photos and videos and provide a "confidence score" that tells you whether or not the media has been altered by AI.

In big tech's continuing battle against the scourge of so-called "fake news" and manipulated imagery used to trick people online, Google has just added a major update to Google Image search: fact checking.

In her new memoir More Myself, Grammy-winning musician Alicia Keys shares a troubling story of a professional photographer who manipulated her into posing provocatively for an album cover. She was just 19 years old at the time.

Following hot on the heels of Instagram's new (and at times controversial) "False Information" warning, Twitter has just announced its own policy around labeling and warning users about photos and videos that have been "deceptively altered" and manipulated.

Vietnamese photojournalist Doan Cong Tinh is apologizing for a Photoshopped Vietnam War photo that he "mistakenly" sent out and had published in an international exhibition.

Charleroi is a town of about 200,000 people in Belgium that has fallen upon some tough times in recent years due to increases in unemployment, poverty, and crime. Italian photojournalist Giovanni Troilo pointed his lens at the city last year, capturing a gloomy photo essay titled "The Dark Heart of Europe." The images were recently awarded 1st prize at the prestigious World Press Photo contest in the Contemporary Issues category.

The contest, which already got a black eye after 20% of the finalists were disqualified for unethical photo editing, has another messy problem on its hands: the town is accusing Troilo of staging his winning photos.

Hungarian photographer and retoucher Flóra Borsi created a popular series of photos last year titled "Photoshop in Real Life." The images imagined what various Photoshop Tools might be used for if they had physical powers in our world, and were quickly shared across the web.

Now Borsi is back with a new set of images that show off her Photoshopping prowess. Titled "Time Travel," the photos show Borsi inserted into various historical photographs of famous individuals.

Photoshop wizard Cristian Girotto's photo series L'Enfant Extérieur (the outer child) takes his subjects' inner children and brings them, quite literally, to the surface. In the series, Girotto explores what adults would look like if men and women never left the cuteness of infancy -- at least in some respects. Each photo, originally captured by photographer Quentin Curtat, shows the subject 'shopped to look like a toddler.

Here's a step-by-step tutorial on how to create a photograph of you holding yourself up. I hope it will give you a good idea of how I create this type of image so that you can create a similar image yourself! Obviously, this is not the only way to create this type of image, but it is the way I have found most believable, as the connection between the two subjects actually occurs in real life. Enjoy!

Last month photographer Chris Crisman entered the photograph above, titled Butterfly Girl, into the World Photography Organization’s 2012 World Photography Awards. It was selected from the thousands of entries as part of a promotional campaign for the contest and in that process was spread out all over the Internet. From the Daily Mail to the Huffington Post, the story about the World Photo Awards and Chris’s photo made the rounds across the web.

In particular, on the UK news site The Daily Mail, the photo generated a ton of comments and sparked some controversy as to whether or not it was appropriate for a photography competition. This caused me to ask myself the question: "What defines a photograph?"

Last week, Sports Illustrated magazine published the above photograph by US Presswire photographer Matthew Emmons. Found in the "Leading Off" section, the photo shows the Baylor Bears football team celebrating after their upset victory over the #2 ranked Kansas State Wildcats.

The image has many people talking, not because of the unlikely event that it captures, but because it appears to be heavily manipulated. And it's not just the fact that the picture looks like it passed through an HDR program, but that the Baylor football players didn't wear green jerseys during that game. They wore black.

The winner of this year's Landscape Photographer of the Year contest, photographer David Byrne, has been disqualified and stripped of his title for violating contest rules regarding digital manipulation. His winning image, titled "Lindisfarne Boats" and shown above, is a black-and-white photo showing beached fishing boats with Lindisfarne Castle in the background.

A Swedish photography company called Skolfoto Norden received some embarrassing press this week after a girl discovered that she had three eyes in the official class portrait it shot.

IKEA found itself in some hot water today after it came to light that a number of women seen in its catalog photographs had been Photoshopped out of the frame for the Saudi Arabian edition. Swedish newspaper Metro broke the story today with a scathing piece titled, "Women Cannot be Retouched Away," writing that IKEA's new catalog reflects the country's oppression of women by editing out every single human with two X chromosomes.

Although Adobe Photoshop's introduction in 1990 spawned the term "Photoshopping", the manipulation of photos has been around pretty much as long as photography itself. To show this fact, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will be holding an exhibition titled, "Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop." The show will feature 200 'shopped photographs created between the 1840s and the 1990s, providing a glimpse into how photographers of old use their work to humor and deceive.

We first shared photographer Rachel Hulin's The Flying Series back in February when it started getting quite a bit of attention online. The series consists of beautifully Photoshopped images of Hulin's baby boy Henry using his magical powers of flight. Since then, Hulin has added more surreal images to the set that capture Henry taking his skills to new locations and new heights.

Photographs of of Syria these days are filled with grim sights of pain and suffering. One Austrian newspaper apparently …

For his project Flying Houses, photographer Laurent Chehere photographed various buildings and then Photoshopped them to transform them into surreal UP-style floating houses.

If you've ever watched a Japanese anime, or even American cartoons for that matter, you probably know that most of the characters have highly unrealistic body proportions -- giant eyes and tiny noses are the norm. Ideal Species is a creepy set of images by photographer Chris Scarborough that imagines what these proportions would look like in the real world. Yup, it's creepy.

Living Dolls is a series by Vancouver-based photographer and retoucher Hayden Wood that shows two models photographed and manipulated to look like plastic Barbie and Ken dolls.

Every year, graphic designer Everett Hiller and his wife throw a party during the holiday season. Afterwards, Hiller Photoshops the photographs captured at the gathering before sending them out to friends and family. He doesn't just fix white balance and removed red eye, but instead sneakily Photoshops various celebrities into the shots. Hiller finds source images of celebrities by doing a search on Google Images for the name -- ranging from presidents to movie stars -- and uses certain keywords (e.g. "dinner" or "I met") to find candid/amateur shots. Photoshopping the celebs into the photos takes about 45 minutes to do.

Here's an awesome TED lecture in which digital artist Erik Johansson discusses creating realistic "photographs" of impossible scenes.

Erik Johansson creates realistic photos of impossible scenes -- capturing ideas, not moments. In this witty how-to, the Photoshop wizard describes the principles he uses to make these fantastical scenarios come to life, while keeping them visually plausible.

Photography author Ben Long has a thought-provoking article over at CreativePro in which …

Last week we reported that the Sacramento Bee had suspended one …

The Sacramento Bee has suspended award-winning staff photographer Bryan Patrick after it was …

News photo agencies EPA, AFP, and Reuters have all issued kill orders for a photo of Kim Jong-il's funeral procession released by the Korean Central News Agency, the state news agency of North Korea. The photo (above at bottom) raised red flags after a comparison with a Kyodo News photo taken just seconds earlier revealed that a number of people had vanished from the scene. The New York Times writes,

A side-by-side comparison of the full images does point to a possibly banal explanation: totalitarian aesthetics. With the men straggling around the sidelines, a certain martial perfection is lost. Without the men, the tight black bands of the crowd on either side look railroad straight.

Perhaps it was a simple matter of one person gilding the lily.

The US is following the UK’s lead in banning advertisements for having too much digital manipulation. The …

Falling Apart is a series by Japanese photographer Yuya Takeda that consists of synthetic photographs of apartment buildings. It's reminiscent of Andreas Gursky's sweeping architectural photographs.

The photographs in artist Max de Esteban's Proposition One project might look like X-Ray images, but they were actually captured with an ordinary camera. They were created by carefully deconstructing old gadgets, photographing them in "layers", then "reassembling" the gadgets digitally. You can see them on display through December 9th at Klompching Gallery in NYC

Advertising photographer Paul Ripke's project "Man Babies" features portraits of parents with their children... with their heads swapped. Ripke enlisted the help of two professional Photoshoppin' friends, and says that the photographs were purely for fun and to test the limits of Photoshop.

Earlier this week, a Reuters photograph showing a Libyan rebel firing an RPG caused a stir after …

Update: Erin from Reuters contacted us informing us that this is in fact a genuine, non-manipulated photograph. Here's a good explanation of why it's real.

Reuters published the above image as an Editor's Choice photo yesterday, and almost immediately readers began leaving comments questioning whether the photograph was Photoshopped. The debate soon spread to other websites, including Reddit, and it appears that the photographs has since been taken down (though it can still be seen in its original slideshow from last week).

A huge photo scandal erupted over in Sweden this past weekend after a well-known and award-winning wildlife photographer admitted to faking some of his photographs. Terje Helleso -- a nature photographer who was named Nature Photographer of the Year by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency in 2010 -- was discovered to have published multiple images in which stock photographs of hard-to-find animals were Photoshopped into nature scenes.

Apparently the universe isn't perfect enough for Apple's products. David Kaplan, a keen-eyed physics professor at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, noticed that an entire galaxy is missing from the image of the Andromeda Galaxy used as OS X Lion's default wallpaper.

Government officials have been caught in a number of Photoshop flubs recently, from the Egyptian president being …

Earlier this week an Internet user in China visited their county government website and was greeted with a horribly Photoshopped photograph showing three government officials inspecting a road.