I'm surprised that courts allow people to use photographic evidence anymore. When I was young, photos were considered king. If you had a photo of something happening, then it was real. A photo was worth a thousand words, and those words came from the reference section.
That's just not true any more. We've all seen how amazingly photos can be touched up. Heck, some of us even get paid for it. Still, in the back of our minds, we always think the photo is the real thing.
These days, with the advent of super powerful tools (I downloaded the Photoshop CS 3 Beta just last week), we can make anyone do anything we want in a photo.
You think you can tell the difference between a photo and a computer generated image? Here's a nice little comparison site I just ran across: Fake or Photo?. Check it out. I only got 5 out of 10 right on the first try.
I doubt there is a single photo in any glossy magazine on the magazine racks today that hasn't been doctored or retouched in some way. With free tools like iPhoto, Mac users can doctor their own photos before publishing them in their own photo books.
What's it going to be like in a couple of years when video evidence is also as easy to fake? It's not that far away – we can already do some amazing things on a single laptop.
Imagine if Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin had the imaging tools in 1967 that we have today. They could've made their famous video look even more real.
One Comment
Hey! I got six out of ten. I think it was just luck, as I took the quiz very quickly.
but, cool and fun…fools the eye too well…I'll have to rely on my mompowers for lie detection in future.
Hee.
Mel