I can't believe they... oh wait, nevermind.

While I realize most of you (I hope) weren't actually fooled into believing that Ben and I would torture Jillian in such a manner, it isn't always this easy to detect and dismiss fake photos. However, this may not always be true. Alin Popescu and Hany Farid from Dartmouth University have recently developed a computer algorithm that aids in the detection of altered photos by looking for places in the image that have been distorted, resized, or rotated. Even when these changes are not detectable by the naked eye, this new computer algorithm can pick them out (Baker 2005). What this means for the future of photo fakery is hard to say, but I'm confident it won't stop photoshop amateurs like me from manipulating images for fun.
In choosing an image to manipulate, I thought it would be fun to make something to submit to our annual family calendar. I have two younger siblings, Ben and Jillian, so I was thinking about choosing some famous group of three to photoshop our heads onto. When I came across the three Stooges, I thought "Perfect!". I think this image basically describes my childhood - Ben and I teamed up to make likkle Jilly-kin's life as 'fun' as possible. I find this image particularly appropriate since Jillian (in the picture) has braces. To do this, I cut our heads out of other pictures with the lasso tool, and then used the eraser tool to clean up the image. I rotated, shrunk, and then changed the heads to black and white in order to make them fit. In order to make my 'hands' appear to be in front of Jillian's head I made her head partially see-through, and then erased where the hands were so they'd show through. I put the border on using Picnik. The background picture I got through an image search, the pictures of Ben and Jillian came off my camera, and the picture of me came off Facebook. I don't consider this image harmful, and my brother likes it, but I've yet to hear what Jillian thinks, so she may disagree.

Article:

Baker, Monya. "Photoshop Sleuths." Technology Review 108.2 (2005): 82. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 10 Nov. 2010.