Is this photo real

Verification order is the whole skill: provenance first, pixels last. Finding the earliest copy and reading its caption settles more cases than every forensic filter combined, and it produces evidence you can show someone. Pixel forensics produces a colourful heatmap and an argument.

The beginner mistake is running error level analysis on a downloaded JPEG and announcing the image is fake. The second is looking for deepfakes: the overwhelming majority of deceptive media is real footage with a false caption — right pixels, wrong war, wrong year, wrong country.

Triage: what question are you actually answering