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I smell photoshop

While recently browsing cheap tripods on amazon (you can never have too many tripod when doing camera trap type work...) I stumbled on one which included this image:


Instantly I was drawn to something that made me suspect this advertisement had been photoshopped! How dishonest! Now, you might spot the giant hand next to the man and assume that is what I am referring to. Not so. Zoom in a bit closer to just the model. 


The tripod on the backpack just looks wrong. Note the lighting on the left tripod leg in particular, very different to the fairly diffused light on the model. The colour is also wrong compared to the rest of the image. Pick out areas that you are fairly certain will be black, for example the lens hood. Does it match the black of the tripod? No. It is almost a greeny blue while the tripod appears very black. The tripod is much warmer than the rest of the picture.

Can we prove the tripod has been added digitally?

There are various techniques to try, such as Error Level Analysis, but in this case the results are pretty subtle, or at least they are to me:


Another option is to try and find the original image, assuming they have just used a stock photo to try and sell the tripod. You could google for terms like "man with backpack taking photo in snow" but you'll quickly find that route isn't sensible. Another option is to use a Reverse Image Search like TinEye.

Since we are making the assumption that the tripod has been digitally added, we need to search for the image without the tripod and the easy way to do that is to crop just the model and upload that to TinEye.

Oh. Epic failure. So what now?

One observation is that the model appears to be using a left handed Nikon (you can see his left finger appears to be on the shutter button) so therefore the image has been flipped. Lets try mirroring it.


That's more like it. We can see this is indeed a stock image and it doesn't contain the tripod. Hurrah. We've successfully proven something that everyone could tell but nobody cared about anyway, that an advert for an inexpensive tripod on Amazon photshopped a stock image rather than paying a model to demonstrate it in a beautiful snowy landscape. 

I'll admit I was impressed when TinEye managed to find a cropped and heavily reduced version of the image, so if this post has anything to offer it is that little observation. Maybe it will be useful for your own analysis one day.

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