As news spread across the world of Iran’s provocative missile tests, so did an image of four missiles heading skyward in unison. Unfortunately, it appeared to contain one too many missiles, a point that had not emerged before the photo was used on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites.

This is the image that ran in the papers and has recently been retracted for being “apparently digitally altered” by Iranian state media. Agence France-Presse said the fourth missile “has apparently been added in digital retouch to cover a grounded missile that may have failed during the test.” Here I’ve blown up a portion of the smoke so you can clearly see the ’shop:

If you wonder how useful this is, let’s walk you through several common tasks.

1) Resizing a screenshot for your blog post:

In this case, ironically it will a meta-screenshot operation, because we’ll be taking a screenshot to illustrate taking a screenshot… you get the picture. It’s as easy as using the rectangle tool, and image, resize:

2) Cutting someone out of a complex picture:

Everyone’s always needing to mask out a person for one reason or another–how well does Paint compare in this regard? It turns out pretty well–the masking tools seem to work better than in Adobe Photoshop:

There are a few downsides to Paint dot NET:

• It doesn’t have all the fancy features that Photoshop has
• It has a limited set of FX plugins (but they’re free)
• It uses more CPU than Photoshop, and feels slightly less responsive
• It’s idea of multiple documents is to have them selectable in a single window
• It’s brush tools are relatively useless because they don’t have varying opacity and flow

Not everything’s bad, though–the source code is open, so you can go fix it up yourself and submit patches to make it better. In another year or two, it will probably be a lot more useful.

Smoke billows from burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut’s suburbs August 5, 2006. Many buildings were flattened during the attack. REUTERS/Adnan Hajj

Then, Reuters issued an image kill for the photo:

Reuters has suspended a photographer until investigations are completed into changes made to a photograph showing smoke billowing from buildings following an air strike on Beirut. Reuters takes such matters extremely seriously as it is strictly against company editorial policy to alter pictures.

The new, correct photo, is this one:

ATTENTION EDITORS: THIS IS A CORRECTED FILE OF LBN20. REUTERS HAS ISSUED A KILL OF THE PREVIOUS VERSION. Smoke billows from burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut’s suburbs August 5, 2006. Picture taken August 5, 2006. REUTERS/Adnan Hajj (LEBANON)

You can check out Yahoo for more photos posted by Adnan Hajj yourself; I don’t immediately see any other doctored photos.

I make a nice elderly couple with myself, don’t I?

I was a scary baby, and a cyanotic little boy.

Making me into an asian or black woman doesn’t work as well.

Oh, this will do wonders for my self-esteem…

I save the best for last. <3.

“You can call me Aaron Burr by the way I’m dropping HAMILTONS”