If you haven't heard by now, newspapers and blogs are reporting that a photo of an Iranian missile test yesterday was digitally manipulated. There were allegedly just three missiles in the original photo, but four in the doctored one.

The New York Times reports that Agence France-Presse obtained the image from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's news Web site, Sepah News. The Associated Press later released an identical-looking photo, except instead of a fourth missile, there was a military vehicle on the ground with a missile on its back ready to fire.

Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at Dartmouth College, wrote an article about faked photos for our June issue. We called him for his take on the missile photo and some other images from a tornado video that some say are forged.

Here's an edited transcript of what Farid had to say.

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.

So what is the verdict on the picture with the four missiles in it?
It's almost certainly doctored in some way, but there are some subtleties here. Whoever did it did a reasonably good job.

What about images from the "faked" tornado video?
It's sort of the same story with the missile images; they are close to one another but are not the same copies. What's being claimed as the original video here from four years ago—the one with the orange sky—it's actually very blurry. The alleged fake, though, appears to be a higher-resolution version. This is not what you expect; if you add information to a picture or change it, it tends to lose resolution.

8 Comments

1. 1. wdodson 11:21 PM 7/10/08

   Actually, a conservative "wing-nut" blog called "Little Green Footballs" (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/30606_New_York_Times_Belatedly_Credits_LGF#rss) first discovered the photoshopped photos. The was the same blog that proved that the Bush National Guard documents were faked that then cuased Dan Rather to be fired.

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2. 2. JHSibal 02:15 AM 7/12/08

   So let me get this right:
   I am to believe that a country which can't fake a photo convincingly is sufficiently proficient and sophisticated in nuclear bomb technology to be a treat to Europe. Not to mention the rest of the world and ultimately, me, sitting here in NYC.
   
   Is this right?
   
   Please explain

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3. 3. JHSibal 02:17 AM 7/12/08

   sic, "threat"
   
   Gosh the enormity of the concept overwhelmed me.

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4. 4. Iahmad 05:52 AM 7/12/08

   There are so many missile test by various countries and I dont see so much of noise by neocon controlled corporate media (CNN, FOX, NYT etc) or self proclaimed free and fair scientific magazines. But Iranophobic neocons have enlisted the help of even scientific magazines like Scientific American to propagate their lies and deceptions. At this rate I do foresee Scientific American with drum beat to support attack and invasion of Iran. You need to return to your basics and report on Science rather than proving right Bush and his ideologues.

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5. 5. FatBear 01:45 PM 7/12/08

   You ignored the most obvious clue. Look at the sky around the plume of the faked missile. It's lighter. A sky usually has a gradient in it, both in hue and in density. It is extremely difficult to match those gradients and the human eye is extremely good at recognizing such anomalies.

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6. 6. FatBear 03:05 PM 7/12/08

   lahmad, I agree with you that the Bush administration has turned its monomaniac eye on Iran, but this particular article does not constitute neocon collaboration by Scientific American. The photo was clearly doctored and they reported and discussed that. Iran is not the evil thing that our evil government wants us to believe, but neither are they all angels. To point out the wrongdoings of their fringe elements is not to be a neocon, it's just to be a good reporter.

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7. 7. FatBear 03:37 PM 7/12/08

   JHSibal, it's a good point, but I don't think it was the government itself which faked the photos and certainly not their nuclear scientists. There's no reason to expect that their nuclear scientists are any stupider than ours - we all do share the same human genome and Arab countries have a history of medical and scientific research stretching back a very long time.
   
   On the other hand, I doubt that most Iranians or their leaders would want the annihilation which would result from their use of nuclear weapons, so I think we can safely assume that they want to use the threat of nukes as a shield. Seeing what we did to Iraq it is hard to blame them.
   
   

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8. 8. crathamana 03:22 AM 7/14/08

   The surgery must be between the two on the right. There is identical print of the ground blast.

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