I Was Wrong. The RPG / Crutch photo may well be perfectly genuine.
And so, I owe Reuters and the photographer my apologies.
There’s the old saying that we, as skeptics and people constantly bombarded by digital manipulation, take to heart: If something it too good to be true, then it probably is. This picture is just too good. It immediately led to a thread on Reddit and on various blogs, where people questioned the authenticity and claimed that it is fake. There were a variety of arguments posed by other people:
The RPG would knock over a guy on crutches.
The shadows are missing.
He’s not firing at anything. (What’s he trying to do, kill trees?)
The back-blast from an RPG is bigger than that.
The RPG flame has a blurry edge and was pasted.The key word in the adage is “probably”. Probably is not the same as absolutely. I rarely rely strictly on my eyes to evaluate images. Instead, I use a suite of algorithms and methods. In this case, the critics at Reddit are wrong. This picture passes every test I have thrown at it as if it is real. It is not a splice, edit, or digital manipulation. There is a little color correction and sharpening, but it is well within the reasonable amount allowed by Reuters. (Even by my own extremely strict definition for “modified” and “manipulated”, I’m calling this “real”.)
Since enough people have asked, here’s my core findings. (For the record, I ran many more tests than the ones listed here, but I’d rather not write a 20-page report if I don’t need to).