How To Verify If A Picture Is Fake Or Real?
With the advancements in the digital world, many software and social applications have popped up in the last few decades. It will not be wrong to say that they have completely changed the view of the world.
It will be very hard to find a person without a social media account today. Other than that, you will come across people with even more than one account.
This whole social media category is a hub of images. Images have gained too much importance since the last few years when their usage has exceeded the imagined limit on social media.
All information communicated is done through social media. Apart from that, many technological advancements have been made in the field of IT which has led to the development of many useful tools for images such as image search.
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Previously, there were not many tools to edit images, which made it easy for people to recognize if the image was real or edited. But with time, advancement in image editing has made it almost impossible to tell if the image is altered or real.
This is very common in social media and digital marketing platforms. Neither the products nor people are what they appear to be.
3 Ways to Verify Pictures
Lighting
Focus on the direction and intensity of light in the picture. Especially if the image is taken indoors and involves a human being, there must be a direction of light falling on him which will be almost the same for the background.
If the background is radiating a different environment light either warmer or brighter or darker, then you can easily say that the image is photoshopped.
This also happens when someone joins two images that have different settings. If one is taken indoors and one is taken outdoors, the lighting will vary drastically.
In a natural environment, during the daytime, the light will tend to fall from many different angles giving an overall look to the image. Whereas an indoor image will have a unidirectional light falling on it.
Reverse Image Search
The reverse image search method also helps to enlist images that relate to the input image. The best benefit of this feature is that it allows you to input images instead of text and enlists images as results.
If you find a photo that appears to be fake or to remove the grain of doubt, use a picture search tool like reverseimagesearch to find if it resembles any other image. The image search algorithm goes through the image data set to find the required results.
An image search also considers tags and titles of images when it starts to enlist relevant material. If any image has related tags and descriptions, the image search algorithm might make it appear in the results.
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If a resembling image is present on Google, or other online platforms, then image search will enlist it at the top. Picture lookup does not only enlist the exact duplicates, but also the image that falls on the same pattern.
So you may find the two or more images that have been combined to make the single one.
Also, this needs to be checked by you if any of the links contain the same image as yours or not. Reverse image search will also mention some links which contain the image or its related ones.
But if your image contains a human, such as a celebrity, the image search algorithm might include other images from the media that include that model as well. Therefore, check the links before assuming that they have the same or related image as yours.
Image search can also enlist the same images if there are any. This means that if the image is available on the internet, and there is no difference, then it must be real. But if several other images resemble the original one, then it can be considered fake.
If you view an image as a profile of a person and want to check whether it is fake or real, image search is the best option you can avail. The first step will be to search by an image that you have and wait for the browser to enlist results.
Background
If people tend to change an existing image and apply a filter to a part of it, it usually makes an unusual change in the background. Either it gets blurry or uneven or gets a destroyed sequence.
This can also help you identify if the picture is real or edited. In some cases, the edited part becomes blurry or noisy which is also a hint for a fake image.
Conclusion:
With social media becoming an endless sea of images, there arise many problems such as fake and real images which cause trouble.
But thanks to recent technological advancements such as image search, you can easily identify if the image is real or fake.
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