If you ask a random person on the street if digital photos can be trusted, the answer is probably going to be a no — even though many prints live most of their lives digitally.

Adobe and others are working on software to heuristically tell if a photo has been altered. From a mathematical perspective, I find this software fascinating, but in a sense it’s self defeating:

• No matter how much the software costs, I suspect that phot forgers are also software pirates, so they’re going to have this software
• You can now iterate on your forged imaged until it passes the test

So essentially a tool for detecting forgeries is a perfect tool for creating forgeries.