[mouse over to see the original image]

The above image of an Iranian missile test appeared on the front page of practically every major news outlet (print, web and tv). The image originated from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s media web site, Sepah News. After the original publication of this photo, The Associated Press released an identical-looking photo, except there were only 3 missiles fired and one remained on the ground.

Scientific American talked to Hany Farid – a digital forensics expert at Dartmouth College – about the photo, and his theories were the best I have read so far…

Do you think the picture with the four missiles has been altered?
It’s pretty clear that all four missiles didn’t launch at the same time. The question is whether this is a straight clone job [copy and paste], like The New York Times blog is suggesting, or if the fourth missile is in fact a separate missile launch that was photographed and then composited into the original picture.

What are some of things that tip you off in these two pictures?
Well, at first glance it looks like the second missile from the left and its trail was possibly copied in the original and then pasted in as the second missile from the right in the edited version. But I’m not so sure it’s that simple a story. If we look at the trails from these two missiles, for starters, there’s a black dot just under the second-from-right missile that’s not there on the other one.

Then there’s the smoke plumes rising from the ground. If you look at the smoke plumes underneath two rockets on the right, those folds of smoke on the right-hand side of the trail look pretty similar, too, though. But if you look very closely, they are not identical; the pixels don’t line up exactly. This distortion could have happened when the JPEG file [a common kind of digital image] was compressed, so it could just be cloned image. Or, it may be that the same kind of missile can make a very similar-looking plume.

Something else to notice here is that in the edited version, the rockets look a little bigger and thicker. This means that they are closer to the camera or the ground. So, it’s a possibility that that so-called edited and the original are actually different shots entirely, taken by two people who took the pictures almost at the same time but from slightly different distances from the launch.

The missile in question is most certainly a combination of a cut & paste job from another photo entirely as well as generous use of the clone tool. The color definition of the sky surrounding the missile indicates that the missile itself was pasted in from another photo. (I doubt it was from the “original photo” above, but we only know of 2 photos of this event. There could be more we just don’t have access to.) I determined this by simply opening the image in Photoshop and saturating the color levels. The pasted in missile sticks out like a sore thumb. If it had been cloned or copied and pasted from the same image, the surrounding color would have blended much better.

There are also areas on the image that were cloned, however. (Shops are usually created from a few methods, not just by the use of one tool.)

As you can see there are some very basic methods that news organizations can use to determine authenticity of photos. Basically just examining this image more closely in Photoshop would have revealed it as fake before the AP even released the second image.