The Internet is ripe with fakes, half-truths, and tom-foolery – let’s be honest. Have you ever wondered if a photo found on a website is undoctored and authenticate? The term photoshopping has become a verb in the modern day lexicon – it’s the idea of using graphical editing tool to touch-up photos, usually resulting in a more pleasant and appealing image. It’s of course named after the most popular graphics program, Adobe Photoshop.

While a lot of times it’s quite obvious a photograph has had some work done on it, it’s not always a certainty.  That’s when it’s handy to leverage the Image Error Level Analyzer web site. The process is simple; visit the website and supply the URL address to a jpeg file on the Internet – the web application handles the rest. But how does it truly work?  In their words:

Error level analysis can help you work out if a photo has been digitally altered. Photos in a jpeg file format actually lose quality each time they are resaved. We can take advantage of this to try and work out if an image has been digitally manipulated.

For instance, if you have a jpeg photo at 90% quality, and resave it, again at 90% quality, you will end up with an image at 90% of 90% (so, 81% quality). If now, you were to copy and paste an element from a different photo into your current photo, you can end up with sections of the image at differing quality levels. This happens because some parts have been resaved three times, whilst some parts may have only been saved once.

If the image has had no alterations to it, all parts of the photo will be at the same quality.

The example on the website is an excellent visual example of what is described above.

Here is a seemingly every day photo of a lovely girl.

When submitted to Image Error Level Analyzer the differing levels of quality in the compression are exemplified by the brighter intensity of the resulting image.

You can see the outlines of the object are rather well defined but pay attention to the eyes and lips area on her face. The highlights strongly encourage that our lovely girl has had some work done! The results aren’t automatically determined but instead require some visual analysis on your part. Once you are familiar with what to look for though you are then able to determine the outcome with far great accuracy.

Though be aware of a general warning heeded on the web site mentions the requirement for high quality photographs though. Low quality photos have a much greater compression ratio and the error level differentials are much more difficult to distinguish.