It has to be a fake... doesn't it?

Seattle Times | Altered photos becoming harder to spot
As someone who spent much of my frustrated youth trying to convince Kansas cousins that professional wrestling was faked, I've always taken great interest in the veracity of images. As a journalist, I've been party to debates over the ethics of even small alterations to news photos.

I've always carried the reassurance, though, that at least faked images could be detected fairly easily. In the Kerry/Fonda situation, a Web logger, Sisyphus Shrugged, offered a detailed (and amusing) deconstruction of the image, pointing out kerning, gray-scale and resolution giveaways.

So I was somewhat disturbed when graphics experts told me that it's getting harder in a digital environment to determine image fakery. So sophisticated are retouching tools becoming that detection is no longer a simple step of blowing up an image's pixels.