You can build a business manipulating photos; how about building one by detecting those manipulations?
My longtime boss Kevin Connor was instrumental in building Photoshop, Lightroom, and PS Elements into the successes they are today, and he taught me the ropes of product management. After 15 years he was ready to try starting his own company, so this spring he teamed up with Dr. Hany Farid (“the father of digital image forensics,” said NOVA). Together they’ve started forensics company Fourandsix (get the pun?), aimed at “revealing the truth behind every photograph.”
Now they’ve put up Photo Tampering Throughout History, an interesting collection of famous (and infamous) forgeries & manipulations from Abraham Lincoln’s day to the present. Numerous examples include before & after images plus brief histories of what happened.
I wish Kevin & Hany great success in this new endeavor, and I can’t wait to see the tools & services they introduce.
Related/previous:
John, this is fascinating. It’s a subject that’s been on my mind for a long time, but especially since the recent “Vancouver Kiss” POS that was touted as an unretouched on-the-spot lucky-me once-in-a-lifetime photograph. I couldn’t believe that the phony image wasn’t dismissed by everyone in the journalistic field.
I’m going to keep an eye on what Fourandsix (it’s most certainly a great punny name) is doing and looking for discussions about this issue. I got interested because I’m a retoucher, but I’ve never been “tested” to determine whether a photo was manipulated or not. The subject came up in a LinkedIn discussion, and that piqued my interest even more. I’m going to check your other references for more information. Cheers! G