Digital Forensics: Photo Tampering Throughout History [Slide Show]
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This story is a supplement to the feature "Digital Forensics: How Experts Uncover Doctored Images" which was printed in the June 2008 issue of Scientific American.
Photography lost its innocence not long after it was born. As early as the 1860s photos were already being manipulated—only a few decades after Joseph Nicéphore Niépce created the first photograph in 1826. With the advent of high-resolution digital cameras, powerful personal computers and sophisticated photo-editing software, the manipulation of digital images has proliferated. Here, I have collected some examples of tampering throughout photography's over 180-year history.
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