For me, this is the most important point of the article:
And although, as Knoll is quick to point out, photos were being altered long ago in Soviet Russia, it was only Photoshop that democratised that ability. In a way Jennifer was the last person to sit on solid ground, gazing out into an infinitely fluid sea of zeros and ones, the last woman to inhabit a world where the camera never lied.
We now live in a world where anything we see, we hear, or speak is never taken on its value any more. You can have a picture of you standing next to Kim Kardashian and everybody will wonder if its actually you standing next to her - or did you manipulate the photo? You can watch a video and we now wonder if what we're seeing is actually real or not.
This photo was the last off ramp to a reality where nothing truly is what it seems anymore. I never thought or could imagine the world I currently reside in.
Forging photos before Photoshop was the work of nation states - and skepticism was low, a fabricated truth was readily accepted.
Photoshop _should_ have destroyed that, but the skill and time to fabricate truth was still high; skepticism remained low.
Now, with AI, the cost of fabricating truth is rapidly approaching zero. Within the last year, nearly everyone I talk to is skeptical of nearly everything. They see an image, or read an article, and wonder if they're being bamboozled.
I see this as a net positive. We are counterintuitively rediscovering skepticism by democratizing nation-state propaganda.
I believe this is a printing press moment, where truth will be spoken to power once again. I just hope we avoid the bloodshed that that the printing press wrought.
Forging photos before Photoshop was the work of nation states
That might be a bit of an overstatement. There were plenty of non-nation states doing image manipulation before digital image manipulation. Double exposure, piecing together negatives and retouching for example was done early in photography's history.
Just one example from ~1850:
Henry Peach Robinson [...] was an English pictorialist photographer best known for his pioneering combination printing - joining multiple negatives or prints to form a single image;
Indeed. At summer camp at age 8, I brushed my face into a photograph of the Grand canyon, by making a mask with an air brush and double exposing it into the photo paper sitting in emulsion.
I see this as a net positive. We are counterintuitively rediscovering skepticism by democratizing nation-state propaganda.
I think you've just described converting a high-trust society into a low-trust one, and I am inclined to think that this is not a good development. That might result in some healthy scepticism of authority, but it'll also get you a thousand Alex Jones and two thousand No Plane Theories.
I believe this is a printing press moment, where truth will be spoken to power once again. I just hope we avoid the bloodshed that that the printing press wrought.
I, too, would like all of the possible good things and none of the possible bad things from any given technological change. Hoping for that won't help much; it might be good, might suck, or somewhere in between and we find some way to muddle through.
You can have a picture of you standing next to Kim Kardashian
> and everybody will wonder if its actually you standing next
> to her - or did you manipulate the photo?
Cameras have always lied. you are viewing a narrow slice of reality frozen in time. this slice has been carefully constructed by the author to show a specific thing. What is the author not showing, what was deliberately left out of the slice? The biggest lie is that there is no lie.
When I was in high school, I was taught basic darkroom techniques for altering film postfacto -- even doing so without doing a negative transfer -- by an old artist friend of mine.
If you're willing to do some basic home chemistry, you can do quite a few things to film during development that will alter in predictable ways the outcome; a favorite of mine is that adding a small amount of buffer solution into your developer and stop bath at the right time can adjust the light curves, which can turn a nighttime photo into a daytime photo if you do it right.
Do you remember or have a link to what buffer you use, and how much? Which paper developers it works with?
I skimmed _The Darkroom Cookbook_, and saw cold/neutral/warm toning paper developers, but didn't see any mention of adding a buffer solution to modify an existing paper developer like you mentioned. I might have missed it.
That sounds like an interesting effect, and I still print from time to time if I can convince myself to drag my enlarger upstairs. (I also have a lot of poorly exposed nighttime shots I'd like to see if I can recover.)
There are ways around that. Apple & Google can embed a private key into the Secure Enclave, sign every image with this key, and at the same time write the hash onto a fast public ledger (e.g. Solana). This validates that this specific image was taken at that specific point in time. Doing it that way would validate the image. That would lead to a world where only these "vetted" images can be trusted and untrusted devices (e.g. Nikon cameras) can take nice pictures but no "truthy" pictures. But it would be an escape hatch.
What if I held up a display in front of that "verified sensor" that shows the manipulated image? Then you'd end up with a "100%, absolutely verified image" of a manipulated image.
This would be counterproductive, it would make "in-camera" fakes more convincing. For instance, political provocateurs could use actors/makeup/etc to stage a scene then take "vetted" photographs of that.
Indeed, this concept has a concrete standard in progress (originating from Adobe, Microsoft, and the BBC) with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA):
C2PA as far as I remember doesn't require a transparency log, but as you mention it could be a good fit as well. Besides Solana, https://transparency.dev/ could be a good option (used as part of Certificate Transparency and Sigstore).
Oh my god. The demo video using the super-early version of Photoshop just taught me several things the lasso and magic wand tools can do in combo that I’ve never known, despite a lot of time using them over the years.
It's hilarious to see all the comments on the video[0] exclaiming at how advanced Photoshop 1.0 was. Indeed, it was a huge advancement in graphics editing at the time, and computers "back then" were capable of quite a lot of stuff. I think if everyone got stuck using a desktop computer from the 90's for a while they'd realize just how little has changed since then (or how much has been just slight iteration) :)
It’s truly depressing that almost none of the reasons that 512MB is no longer a luxurious amount of memory have to do with software being more capable and useful than it used to be.
It is a photo that lends itself to photoshopping. Wide vista with distinct objects that do not interact. Solid borders between objects (horizon, green island on blue sky). Blocks of relatively homogenous texture. A near total lack of shadows, with the only one visible conveniently blurred by shallow water. And a subject exotic/remote enough that most people will not recognize any inconsistencies. It is so open to editing that I could believe it was built from scratch.
Comments
For me, this is the most important point of the article:
And although, as Knoll is quick to point out, photos were being altered long ago in Soviet Russia, it was only Photoshop that democratised that ability. In a way Jennifer was the last person to sit on solid ground, gazing out into an infinitely fluid sea of zeros and ones, the last woman to inhabit a world where the camera never lied.
We now live in a world where anything we see, we hear, or speak is never taken on its value any more. You can have a picture of you standing next to Kim Kardashian and everybody will wonder if its actually you standing next to her - or did you manipulate the photo? You can watch a video and we now wonder if what we're seeing is actually real or not.
This photo was the last off ramp to a reality where nothing truly is what it seems anymore. I never thought or could imagine the world I currently reside in.
That sentence hit me hard too.
Forging photos before Photoshop was the work of nation states - and skepticism was low, a fabricated truth was readily accepted.
Photoshop _should_ have destroyed that, but the skill and time to fabricate truth was still high; skepticism remained low.
Now, with AI, the cost of fabricating truth is rapidly approaching zero. Within the last year, nearly everyone I talk to is skeptical of nearly everything. They see an image, or read an article, and wonder if they're being bamboozled.
I see this as a net positive. We are counterintuitively rediscovering skepticism by democratizing nation-state propaganda.
I believe this is a printing press moment, where truth will be spoken to power once again. I just hope we avoid the bloodshed that that the printing press wrought.
That might be a bit of an overstatement. There were plenty of non-nation states doing image manipulation before digital image manipulation. Double exposure, piecing together negatives and retouching for example was done early in photography's history.
Just one example from ~1850:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Peach_Robinson
Indeed. At summer camp at age 8, I brushed my face into a photograph of the Grand canyon, by making a mask with an air brush and double exposing it into the photo paper sitting in emulsion.
I think you've just described converting a high-trust society into a low-trust one, and I am inclined to think that this is not a good development. That might result in some healthy scepticism of authority, but it'll also get you a thousand Alex Jones and two thousand No Plane Theories.
I, too, would like all of the possible good things and none of the possible bad things from any given technological change. Hoping for that won't help much; it might be good, might suck, or somewhere in between and we find some way to muddle through.
Or children: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies
I don't want "democratized" flat-earther GenAI slop being given equal billing as Hubble or James Web imagery (aka NASA propaganda)
Smallpox. Authoritatian Populism. Etc.
This is why credentialism matters. Some things are good to be skeptical of. Others, not so much.
Most people would wonder who that woman is.
Cameras have always lied. you are viewing a narrow slice of reality frozen in time. this slice has been carefully constructed by the author to show a specific thing. What is the author not showing, what was deliberately left out of the slice? The biggest lie is that there is no lie.
https://petapixel.com/2012/10/01/famous-valley-of-the-shadow...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies
When I was in high school, I was taught basic darkroom techniques for altering film postfacto -- even doing so without doing a negative transfer -- by an old artist friend of mine.
If you're willing to do some basic home chemistry, you can do quite a few things to film during development that will alter in predictable ways the outcome; a favorite of mine is that adding a small amount of buffer solution into your developer and stop bath at the right time can adjust the light curves, which can turn a nighttime photo into a daytime photo if you do it right.
Do you remember or have a link to what buffer you use, and how much? Which paper developers it works with?
I skimmed _The Darkroom Cookbook_, and saw cold/neutral/warm toning paper developers, but didn't see any mention of adding a buffer solution to modify an existing paper developer like you mentioned. I might have missed it.
That sounds like an interesting effect, and I still print from time to time if I can convince myself to drag my enlarger upstairs. (I also have a lot of poorly exposed nighttime shots I'd like to see if I can recover.)
There are ways around that. Apple & Google can embed a private key into the Secure Enclave, sign every image with this key, and at the same time write the hash onto a fast public ledger (e.g. Solana). This validates that this specific image was taken at that specific point in time. Doing it that way would validate the image. That would lead to a world where only these "vetted" images can be trusted and untrusted devices (e.g. Nikon cameras) can take nice pictures but no "truthy" pictures. But it would be an escape hatch.
What if I held up a display in front of that "verified sensor" that shows the manipulated image? Then you'd end up with a "100%, absolutely verified image" of a manipulated image.
This would be counterproductive, it would make "in-camera" fakes more convincing. For instance, political provocateurs could use actors/makeup/etc to stage a scene then take "vetted" photographs of that.
Indeed, this concept has a concrete standard in progress (originating from Adobe, Microsoft, and the BBC) with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA):
https://c2pa.org/
C2PA as far as I remember doesn't require a transparency log, but as you mention it could be a good fit as well. Besides Solana, https://transparency.dev/ could be a good option (used as part of Certificate Transparency and Sigstore).
That assumes a high level of tech literacy and a high level of trust in the tech companies implementing the system.
All you need is one demagogue saying “it’s fake, you can’t trust them, big tech is lying to you” etc. And people will believe that.
Oh my god. The demo video using the super-early version of Photoshop just taught me several things the lasso and magic wand tools can do in combo that I’ve never known, despite a lot of time using them over the years.
It's hilarious to see all the comments on the video[0] exclaiming at how advanced Photoshop 1.0 was. Indeed, it was a huge advancement in graphics editing at the time, and computers "back then" were capable of quite a lot of stuff. I think if everyone got stuck using a desktop computer from the 90's for a while they'd realize just how little has changed since then (or how much has been just slight iteration) :)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tda7jCwvSzg
It’s truly depressing that almost none of the reasons that 512MB is no longer a luxurious amount of memory have to do with software being more capable and useful than it used to be.
It is a photo that lends itself to photoshopping. Wide vista with distinct objects that do not interact. Solid borders between objects (horizon, green island on blue sky). Blocks of relatively homogenous texture. A near total lack of shadows, with the only one visible conveniently blurred by shallow water. And a subject exotic/remote enough that most people will not recognize any inconsistencies. It is so open to editing that I could believe it was built from scratch.
I remember being amazed by this 1986 documentary, where David Hockney uses a Quantel Paintbox to do digital painting & image manipulation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-JpI4egl2o
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantel_Paintbox
Thanks for that, I remember watching it when broadcast and being amazed by the possibilities. I hadn’t thought about it in years.
A recent Reddit thread [1] has some pictures of the Pixar Image Computer mentioned in the article.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/1f3lzr...
Pity they don't have the "before" photo, so we can see what the photoshop effort added.
I believe that is the "before" photo, he would then do things like create a duplicate of her or change the background as an example.
There’s an example of him manipulating this photo in the linked demo video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tda7jCwvSzg
Related: "Lenna" - A pretty much de facto standard image for testing image editing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna (and a personal story behind the image: http://www.lenna.org/)