Popuar Science ran a good article on digital imagery and detecting fakery in their October 2005 issue ("Seeing is Not Believing" by Steve Casimiro, pg 70). Some of the samples referenced are pretty obviously fakes to the trained eye but there are so many people who don't know how to spot the subtle inconsistencies. I have pointed out so many altered advertisements to my wife that she can now spot them pretty easily. Still, there are some alterations that require more than just being able to see a change.
I was particularly impressed with the advances being made in detecting forgeries by looking at the patterns of data in the original image. There are some pretty big shortcomings, however.
When it comes to protecting copyrights I am particularly interested in digital watermarking. At least one company (Digimark) has a service which lets individuals download a Photoshop plugin to read watermarks. To embed them, however, requires a subscription costing various amounts depending on the number of photos being protected.
I have struggled with the desire to protect my imagery while still making good quality images available on the web for portfolio viewing. While digital watermarks are a great idea they don't prevent the unscrupulous from taking an image and using it wherever they like. Ultimately the solution becomes one of defacing the image with a greyed watermark which can often be a distraction but also leaves no doubt as to who owns the image.
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