Real or not? How to spot a fake nude photo (Part I. Illumination & reflection)

We’re living in a crazy world where each and every bit of information can be digitized as piles of 0 and 1, and in many ways manipulated and forged. It’s also such a horny world to live in, where the Internet is full of tits, pussies, cocks and hardcore porns. Did you ever wonder, when seeing a shockingly indecent image of your favorite idol, “Is this damned real? Did he/she really do that or was it just another photoshopped fake?” Or even more likely, when trying to make such an image yourself for fun, “Why does my edit always look so fake and disharmonic (違和感)?” Well, in either case, this article is right for you!

Fake nudes are all over the Internet!

Let’s be honest. Most fake nude photos out there on the Internet were just so poorly made that almost everyone can tell from plain vision they’re nonrealistic and fake – make no mistake about it. That’s never the point, though, since anime waifus and old-timer sex dolls are undoubtedly nonrealistic too, but a lot of lonely people still have the best time enjoying those. However, with a clear mind, I’m only interested in super realistic things, that is, all the characteristics which make a photo “look real”. Understanding these may help you better distinguish between a real photo and a fake one; moreover, you’ll see how to make your own edits more real than real, hard to distinguish, and it’s all for your own pleasure. Just like a champ!

Yes, there are indeed so many fake photos that were too good not to fap to. But there are also many techniques to find out whether a photo is realistic or maliciously edited (by combining different human parts together, for instance, most commonly, the face of your dream girl and the body of a porn star). If your naked eyes can’t tell you what’s wrong but you still feel something isn’t quite right, then you might need to take a closer look at the lightness, saturation, hue, and noise compatibility of the assembled parts in the edited photo, and matters like the human body’s spatial structure and dynamics so that your collage follows the basic anatomy. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be an expert in computer vision or anatomy to master this magical power at all. Today I’m gonna start with a simplest but very useful trick: illumination and reflection.

Illumination is essential for artistic photography (photo by: Sally Mann)

So, if you’ve got some basic knowledge of photography, then you might already know that the terminology “illumination” refers to lighting, and it is super important for essentially every photo. Human bodies don’t emit light themselves; they’re visible only because they can reflect lights from the environment. Three main sorts of light sources in portrait photography are: (1) Direct natural light, either unrestricted or bound by the area of an open window. This kind of illumination can be observed in most types of photos. (2) Direct artificial light, which comes either from interior lighting in the room or the flashlight of a camera. This kind of illumination is often observed in most amateur photography. (3) Reflected light, by a reflector or a mirror. This kind of illumination is commonly employed by professional photographers.

With a photo opened in your favorite graphics editor (say it’s Adobe Photoshop or GIMP), it can be easily blurred or sharpened, white balanced, saturated into a more “colorful” image, or even desaturated into a black-and-white image. So the absolute RGB value of a pixel alone doesn’t really give you much information for judging the entire photo. However, there is one thing which can’t lie to you: the lighting. We can try observing reflected lights from objects, and figuring out if a suspicious photo is actually fake or not.

Many advanced graphics editors provide us with a nice tool called “Curves”. For Photoshop users, it can be found under the menu entry “Image > Adjustments > Curves”. For GIMP, it’s under the menu entry “Colors > Curves”. They look more or less like this:

Now, try dragging the control point downwards first and make sure it touches the bottom line, then slowly to the right. Observe the change carefully.

OK, if you have never tried anything like this before, you might still have no clue what you’re doing, but I strongly encourage you to try this yourself, before I explain in words: By moving the control point downwards, you’re making the photo look both “darker” and higher contrasted, so that only the lighter part could be seen. By then moving the point rightwards, you’re making the photo even more darker and darker, so that more and more things are fading out, leaving only the lightest part visible in the picture. No need to learn the math behind all this, just try it out and get a feel how it works.

The first thing you should then practice is:

(0) Identify the light source(s) from the reflections in the photo, locate them and their directions.

In the above photo of Lenna, you can easily locate two main light sources: One (A) is from the big round window, another (B) is from the skylight on the other side of the room. This is a perfect example of lighting in portrait photography.

As an exercise, find more realistic photos like this (try googling some tasty keywords like “metart” with safe search off), and spot their light sources.

(1) If the main light comes from front or above (which is often the case) and the person is facing the camera in a regular position, then the face should not get darker than the body (because of the makeup that gives her face a higher reflectance; also because human facial skin tends to be more oily than the body skin in natural conditions).

This is actually a common pattern of disharmony found in many fakes. When the illumination is from the front, the face receives roughly the same light as the body (or even more when it comes from the above), so there’s no reason for it to reflect less light. (unless she wears no makeup so her face looks too pale, or she’s got extremely big breasts, but those are very rare)

See the following examples of fake photos, they all have nonrealistic light reflections which made them look disharmonic:

Also, see the following as a good example. This is what a photorealistic image should really look like: The light reflections on the girl’s face and her body match so well, and the face looks slightly brighter than the body. I would say this photo looks super real and it’s not easy to fake it (a great expertise must be required, I assume).

(2) If the light comes from other directions so that the face actually receives less light than the body, try then spotting the inconsistency of lighting. Most fakes, even good ones, didn’t get every detail right!

It can be relatively tricky to fabricate photos in such case, because once the main light is not from front or above, then reflections could diverge so much and bad quality fakes can be more easily distinguished by naked eyes. There are good ones though, a careful observer can still spot the inconsistency. See the following:

In the above fake of Emma Watson (it’s a good one, by the way), you can locate a strong whitened light source coming from the right side in the photo, reflected on one side of her body. However, this tint of white does not reflect on the same side of her face. That’s why you know immediately for sure it’s a fake.

In the above fake, the face was taken from a different photo so the reflection of light is inconsistent, so it looks unnatural and nonrealistic.

You can see what the original nude photo (of Kishi Aino) looks like:

The technique we talked about so far applies the best to distinguishing fake photos with manually “assembled” face and naked body, by using a graphics editor. If the body isn’t fully or partly naked, then this technique does not work well since clothes have very different reflectance than the human skin. If the face was swapped by A.I. related deep learning methods, then its illumination and reflection might not be so different from the originals, and this technique is likely to fail as well; but there are still good ways to spot a “deep fake” or “deep nude”, which we’ll get to later in the future.

Next time I’ll give a write-up about body features, and possibly some practical human anatomy too. Bodies, on themselves, are biometric characteristics just like faces and fingerprints. Don’t get any of them wrong, and always spot a fake photo when some organ is out of place!

TIPS: How to fake like a champ?

1. Learn from photography. Good photos are good photos, whether they involve nudity or not. They give you a better sense of how lights and reflections work in nature, and help you make your own photo edits more credible.
2. Pick up some drawing. Know the basics of artistic anatomy. Human body is organic, where every part should fit into each other properly.

Remember: Don't be satisfied too easily. Stay tight and work hard!