Cynthia L. Baron

I expected this book to be have tutorials on how to use photoshop. I never thought I'd read the thing cover to cover! This book was incredibly interesting, showing how photography's truth standard has dropped dramatically over the years. From creating your own fake, to learning how to spot others, this book was a fascinating read.

The cons were that at the end of the book it started to discuss some uninteresting things such as how to fake a ghost image which isn't too fascinating. The other thing that bugs me about the book is that it didn't mention The GIMP, which is a free alternative to photoshop, and which all of the tutorials in this book could have been completed with.… (mere)

I find this a useful book, but it doesn't really answer the mail. The topic of 'forensics', meaning the systematic application of investigative techniques in order to find defensible evidence of activity, is not really covered. The author provides a fair amount of background on a wide variety of different photo fakes, starting with the counterfeiting or manipulation of scanned ID cards and documents, and moving on to a discussion of the integrity of photographic evidence in a court of law. A discussion on the long history of doctored photos used for propaganda pictures is followed by examples of how celebrities are slimmed down. Several of the recent classic cases of deceitful photo manipulation by press photographers are discussed. The approximately 360 pages are well-illustrated, which is obviously necessary, but it could have been slimmed down quite a bit. I skimmed over the parts that dealt with elementary Photoshop--a great deal of time is spent showing how to actually make fakes, which would be helpful for the complete Photoshop novice, but any digital photographer or graphic artist would find it tedious. The references are good and the bibliography complete.

In summary, the book provides an excellent introduction to the subject of photo fakery in multiple contexts, and provides a neophytes guide to the use of Photoshop to create fakes. However, other than this awareness material, the book in no way, shape or form deals with the topic of forensics, so I consider the title to be misleading, which is a bit ironic in a book that includes the word 'truths' in the subtitle.… (mere)