And in 1981, when the Soviet Union wanted to downplay the military's role in the Soviet space program, they eliminated Soviet missile chief Kirill S. Moskalenko, who, in military attire, originally appeared in a photo between cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and rocket expert Sergei Korolev during their first launch of man into space. Video scanners and digital cameras turn a photograph into an arrangement of electronic digits, or pixels, which are then stored in the computer's memory. With easy to use, popular imaging programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Astral Development's Picture Publisher , and the novice's favorite, Ofoto , you can open a scanned image, zoom in an out of sections of it, and move about those pixels as you wish. With advances such as these, even newspapers are gravitating towards digitized photos. But the damage doesn't stop at still photographs.
Videotapes are subject to easy manipulation as well.
By connecting a machine very similar to a VCR to a computer's hard drive, you can digitize the images of video, allowing you to reenter the document, re-working and changing images frame by frame. This is the method of cover-up used in the fictional murder mystery by Michael Crichton in Rising Sun . In the past, photographs were considered to be unabashedly true, since even older forms of manipulation are often easily detectable. Because of this, photographs have always enjoyed leniency in being used as evidence in a courtroom. As photographic manipulation becomes more prevalent, this latter guideline may be more difficult to enforce.