Be a Photoshop detective with Forensically

Aug 24, 2015 13:03 GMT  ·  By

Forensically is a Web-based toolkit that can analyze if a photo has been edited in any way, all in your browser and working offline.

Jonas Wagner is the developer that created this fantastic tool, which is capable of seeing if someone has photoshopped official documents, made alterations to their so-called "professional" photography, or if Tinder or Ashley Madison love interests have modified their waste line or face.

Dubbed as a photo forensics software, Forensically comes packed with a slew of tools to help you find spots on the image where someone make modifications to the original.

The first one is a magnifier that enlarges pixels and their contrast. This tool is ideal for high-resolution images, where little specs of dust on the camera lens can be investigated.

As Mr. Wagner puts it, "With these specs of dust you could actually match an image to specific camera and lens configurations, just like bullets can be matched to a gun with ballistic fingerprinting."

The second tool is Clone Detection, developed specifically to detect the "clone tools" of various photo editing software, tools that copy a portion of an image to another section of the same photo. If you used Photoshop, you'll know exactly what we're referring to and what this function does.

The third tool included in Forensically is an Error Level Analysis system which can detect when an image has been compressed multiple times in a row, a process that usually happens when an image is edited. Forensically highlights these sections as very light or very dark, compared to similar regions on the same picture.

Forensically highlights portions of an image that have been edited

The fourth Forensically tool is called Noise Analysis and can be used "for identifying manipulations to the image like airbrushing, deformations, warping and perspective corrected cloning." As Jonas Wagner specifically mentions, this "works best on high-quality images."

The fifth tool included in the package is a simple metadata (tags) viewer, which can easily reveal information about the last editing date and the software used to do it, just in case the person who did the editing didn't know data like this is stored in each picture and didn't strip it from its header.

In case a photo also contains geo-location details, the Forensically Geo Tags feature will extract this data from the meta tags and plot them on a map.

But these two tools rely on data stored in the header of each image, which can be edited by anyone with the proper tools and is generally considered unreliable.

Last but not least, there's also a Thumbnail Analysis feature. Since most cameras and editing software also create a smaller thumbnail of the image which operating systems use for file previews, this tool can be used to show differences between the thumbnail and the full resolution image.

Forensically works locally, doesn't upload your photos online

If photo editing software don't make changes to the thumbnail image (stored in the high-resolution picture), this can easily be used to detect photo edits with just a quick glance.

Forensically is currently free to use, works inside your browser alone, doesn't use add-ons, and doesn't upload anything online, using various JavaScript-based tools to analyze photos locally.

We have contacted Mr. Wagner to see if he plans on keeping Forensically free, if he intends to monetize his service, or if he'll release the application's source code on GitHub in the coming future. We'll update the post with his reply.

UPDATE: "I have no plans to monetize Forensically or any other application I have developed. I might release the source code. I'm mainly struggling with finding an appropriate license that allows collaboration but prevents someone from just copying everything and stuffing it full of ads (that happened with other things in the past)."