Scientific Publication Condemns Photo-Manipulation

valdean writes "According to a recent article in the New York Times (registration and short biography required) scientific journals have begun to respond to a growing problem of photo-manipulation in submitted manuscripts. At The Journal of Cell Biology, a test developed in 2002 revealed that 25 percent of all accepted manuscripts had one or more illustrations that were manipulated to the point of violating the journal's guidelines. Examples included the duplication of images for re-presentation as a control experiment, making pictures prettier with the clone stamp tool, use of the contrast tool to hide data, and merging portions of several images so that they appear to be a single image. How were many of these scientists caught? They submitted layered Adobe Photoshop files that showed exactly what they had done."

Question

I don't know much about imaging techniques. But how easy is it to tell a picture's been manipulated without having the original source in hand?

Re:Question

It depends on the skills of the person manipulating the image, and the image quality. The higher resolution the picture, the easier it is to zoom in and spot anomalies. If the picture is craptastic to begin with, it's harder to see the differences (tough to tell if the blurring is a result of someone mucking with the picture, or just poor quality).

The biggest roadblock to telling whether an image is real or not is time, in my opinion. If you generally trust the person providing the photos and they're not too unbelievable, you probably won't spend time trying to figure out whether it's reliable or not.

Re:Question

In this case, they had the source, which tells me that the scientists that got caught weren't exactly the sharpest spoons in the drawer.

Here's a prior slashdot posting [slashdot.org] about mathematical techniques to identify photo manipulation. And another article [oemagazine.com] detailing some techniques.

Re:Question

Also FTFA:

The editor of the journal, Ira Mellman of Yale, said that most cases were resolved when the authors provided originals. "In 1 percent of the cases we find authors have engaged in fraud," he said.

So, my original statement is completely true, mo

Re:Question

Others have made good replies to this but thought I'd add my $0.02

Generally, image manipulation will leave a signature of some sort on the file - do a fourier transform (view the image as frequency data as opposed to spatial) and you can see some of them pretty clearly. They generally show up as very low or very high frequency noise distributed more or less uniformly around the origin. Then there's edge detection; most computer-based photo manipulation creates or erodes edges and a basic edge detection algorithm will show the problem to most human observers.

As mentioned by others, a low quality original can make it much harder to detect manipulation.

Re:Question

I am a photographer more than I am a scientist. To what degree would the digital darkroom techniques that I routinely practice be considered fraudulent by scientific journals?

1. Use of a little unsharp masking: this is the digital equivalent of tweaking th

Sad really.

Ctrl+E or Layer -> Merge Layers is so difficult these days...

NeoThermic

Re:Sad really.

I do believe (and hope) that most of the photo-manipulators were simply unaware of the journal's guideline. It is in fact a gray area of the scientific publication ethics. For example if I take a phtography of a rock for a geology publication, I am surely allowed to tweak contrasts with photoshop in order to show clearly the structure of the rock. But I suppose that the exact same manipulation would be unethical if I were to hide details that could serve as a counter-example of my thesis. While in doubts, it is probably better to send a photoshop file to the journal, showing all the (hopefully) minor photomanipulations made to the image. If the journal thinks that something is abnormal, one can discuss about it, most of the time a polite conversation can probably solve these issues.

Re:Sad really.

For example if I take a phtography of a rock for a geology publication, I am surely allowed to tweak contrasts with photoshop in order to show clearly the structure of the rock. But I suppose that the exact same manipulation would be unethical if I were to hide details that could serve as a counter-example of my thesis.

Agreed. It sounds like, though, that most of the incidents here were more like if you included your foot in the bottom of the picture of the rock and edited it out. The editors said that only a very small subset of the violations were deliberate attempts at fraud.

Not really the worst

If they submitted multi-layed photoshop files, most of them probably were not concerned with getting caught. So they must not have thought what they were doing was unethical. And having the journal come up with some guidelines and a review process for images is hardly going to make a difference.

The problem is the attitude. If they think that modifying these images isn't unetherical, then how about the data? And how will you ever catch those people? It's just a sad state of affairs in this scientific community.

Re:Not really the worst

If they submitted multi-layed photoshop files, most of them probably were not concerned with getting caught.

Yeah, and if the US gov't publicly released PDFs of documents with the "secret stuff" censored out by merely drawing an opaque black box over it,

Not layered images

Unless I'm mistaken, the article never states that the scientists submitted layered Photoshop images that revealed their misdeeds. I find it very unlikely that a journal would ever accept an image in photoshop format -- they usually want press-ready formats like PDF, EPS, or JPG.

From the article, it sounds like the editors just fool around with brightness and contrast of submitted images, and that often reveals the discontinuities from an edit. However, the specifics are not in the article, so don't jump to conclusions.

Re:Not layered images

Scientific Journals, like the various AGU [agu.org] publications, typically prefer [agu.org] photographs in .jpg, false-color data in .tiff, and charts, graphs, and other line-art suitable images as .eps. .Png is acceptable for electronic versions. Photoshop .psd's are not ac

Glad this came up

Not because it exposed people who were fast and loose with their photos but because it brings up the whole issue of digital photo manipulation for entries. I recently submitted two photos for a local photo contest which were done from film.

When it came time to see the submitted photos I took my parents along so they could see how my prints stacked up to the others.

Of the roughly 30 prints that were submitted there were at least two I was sure had been manipulated and possibly one more. The one case was blatant. The submitter had done a poor cut and paste of a wood duck. The other was the merging of two photos which produced a very nice looking picture.

As more and more people use digital cameras and then PhotoShop (or other programs) the 'art' of photography goes away since the original photo can so easily be manipulated. Unlike in traditional photography where the negative or slide is the original and any manipulation of that original can be easily seen.

Personally I would like to see photo contests have two separate categories. One for film cameras and one for digital with the understanding that the digital photo may have been manipulated in a way beyond what traditional photos can be. Like the article I'm not talking about enhancing contrast since that can be done with different paper or chemical process for film photos but rather the addition or subtraction of wholesale items.

Yes, adding and removing objects from a film photo can be done but it is more labor-intensive and harder to pull off than with a photo manipulation program.

Granted, if people would just be honest about what they submit we wouldn't have to have this discussion but the same could be said about laws or notices to not do something.

reminds me of an older complaint

> As more and more people use digital cameras and then PhotoShop (or other programs) the 'art' of photography goes away

Ok, so it was a little before my time, but I seem to remember hearing that the whole idea that photography could even be an art form was rejected at first, especially by painters. Frankly, while I'm willing to concede that photography most certainly can be art, it seems to me that digital image manipulation provides at least as much, and possibly far more, room for artistic expression.

Seems to me like there's a bit of poetic justice here. (Is poetic justice a form of art?) I bet there's a bunch of dead painters who would (if they could) be rolling around laughing at the irony of a photographer complaining about people who take advantage of technology to make their art "too easily". :)

Re:Glad this came up

Just because manufacturers no longer make film cameras (well, most don't) doesn't mean that film won't still be used.

Olympus hasn't made a film camera in roughly a decade but myself and others still use them.

Maybe in the distant future, something like 200

Re:Glad this came up

I suspect that black and white will hang around for a long time because it's pretty inexpensive stuff. Color, on the other hand, is on the way out. It's not that there's no reason to use color film - you still can't get the resolution out of any CCD that y

Allowed Image Manipulations

From the summary:
...violating the journal's guidelines. Examples included ... use of the contrast tool to hide data...

The actual article is a bit more nuanced:

To prohibit such manipulations, Dr. Rossner and Dr. Mellman published guidelines saying, in effect, that nothing should be done to any part of an illustration that did not affect all other parts equally. In other words, it is all right to adjust the brightness or color balance of the whole photo, but not to obscure, move or introduce an element.

If a researcher manipulates only part of an image then the researcher is implicitly admitting that there was something in the image that they chose to ignore. On the other hand, if a researcher changes the contrast of the whole image to make it easier to see the patterns they are drawing their conclusions from, then they can always claim they really didn't notice the other stuff. Essentially, researchers have to avoid doing things that prove that they were deliberately dishonest.

Moral of the Story

Always flatten your images before submitting them.

(OK, not really, but you know some people of less-than-sterling ethics are going to walk away with that instead of the real lesson, i.e. don't fudge your data.)

Rubbish

All photographs are manipulations. None capture the exact data represented by the obect in real life.

Before photographing the item it lit, framed, lensed, exposed, and captured at a point in time. Plenty of room for manipulation.

So what's the difference between physical manipulation before the capture and digital manipulation after?

There is only honesty and dishonesty. Manipulation is a given.

Altered photos are a GOOD thing... IF

Altered photos are a good thing IF they are clearly labeled as "photo-illustration," "enhanced photograph," "composite photograph," or the like, with the original photos made available to the publisher and the peer reviewers or better yet to the general readership.

When studying a scientific photo, I don't want to be distracted by less-interesting bits of information - I want my attention drawn to the point the author is trying to make.

You only have a problem if the reader thinks he is looking at one thing when in fact he is looking at something else.

automatic manipulation?

In microscopes I have used (of the electron and scanning probe variety), often automatic image processing is used when you save an image. We've had to be very careful to make sure that we have disabled anything we can, and in some cases, have had to scrap software and write our own to make sure we weren't losing data.

Really, the problem is that there isn't room in a scientific paper to put dozens of images proving your point. When you're given 3 pages, you select the best image or two that you have. Ultimately, an editor or reviewer can ask for supplemental information if there is any doubt in the result. Perhaps the problem is that reviewers aren't asking to see (or people are not providing) the supplimental data which a good scientist uses to determine truth.

Photoshop 10 forbids photo manipulation

Today Adobe releases the 10-th release of its popular program "Photoshop". The hit feature in this release is that the software maker has forbidden all sort of image manipulation, answering concerns from the scientific community:

"There were numerous reports about photo manipulation in manuscripts from the scientific community. Few years back, when the government asked us to forbid opening images with scanned banknotes in them due to possibility for money conterfeiting, we responded and implemented the appropriate algorithms to comply. With this release, we're just taking the next step."

Among the features unaffected in Photoshop 10 remain zooming in/out and panning.

According to Adobe, Photoshop 10 will be available to purchase at retailers world-wide early next month.

There's a difference...

A retouched microscope shot would erase critical data such as molecule clusters, etc. A scientific journal must not allow this. In other words, magazine girls are NOT used as basis for developing new medical treatments that might heal or kill someone.

Re:There's a difference...

"magazine girls are NOT used as basis for developing new medical treatments that might heal or kill someone."

But if they were, imagine the demand for jobs in pharma and medical research.