How to Spot a Photoshopped Image: A Free Photoshop Detector & Edited Photo Checker

Signs a photo was edited

• Text that looks sharper, darker or straighter than the text around it — common on edited certificates and bills.
• A patch with different blur, grain or colour than the rest of the photo.
• The same texture repeated twice — a sign of the clone-stamp tool.
• Halos, hard edges or mismatched shadows around an object that was pasted in.
• Metadata showing an editing app such as Photoshop, Lightroom, PicsArt, Snapseed, Canva, PixelLab or Phonto.

How a photoshopped image detector works

An edited photo checker looks for traces left by editing and re-saving:

• Error Level Analysis (ELA) re-saves the image and compares it with the original. Pasted or retyped areas compress differently and light up on a heatmap.
• Clone detection finds regions copied from elsewhere in the same photo — and confirms it by matching the camera's sensor noise, so two genuinely similar objects aren't flagged.
• Software signatures in EXIF, XMP and Content Credentials reveal which app last saved the file.
• A camera-thumbnail check compares the small preview the camera wrote at capture time with the actual picture; if they differ, the photo changed after it was taken.

Is there a photoshop detector app?

You don't need to install anything: popped.info works in the browser on Android and iPhone, and you can add it to your home screen like an app. Businesses can use the same checks through an API to screen refund photos, listings or certificates automatically.

Limits worth knowing

A careful edit that is re-saved many times or heavily resized can hide its traces, and a simple crop or brightness change is editing but not fraud. Always read the reasons: "saved by Lightroom" means something very different from "compression anomaly where the grade was retyped".