I have a book on details to look for in photo photography. It references techniques used by the CIA and national security to determine false images circulated by the Soviets and others.
I cannot find this book on Google though because of all of the tinfoil literature attacking the CIA for faking photos.
Meanwhile Al Reuters engages in such trickery commonplace (as does the LA Times, National Geographic, and other “respected” media outlets).
I’d tell you the title of the book if I could look it up at this time...
It’s now possible to put together a fabricated image that’s all but undetectable. You’d have to get down to the individual pixel level to be able to tell, and a determined forger could throw a monkey wrench into even that. That’s when you start looking at the code generated, by the various software. We’re down to steganography now, as far as sophisticated fraud. On the flip side, steganography has been used to conceal communications, too. It’s possible to encode a message into a picture, and next to no one would have a clue.