Now it's Keith's turn to play.

Most of these tricks can be done in an ordinary darkroom, too, but that takes more time and the cost of materials mounts up as you discard the prints that didn't quite work.

At this scale and scanner resolution, it's not obvious that the elephants and the sunset came from  different pictures. The oddities in the lower right cloudy area could just be artifacts of poor scanning, and so could the extra-fuzzy bit of the big elephant's rump.

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This busker is deliberately unreal, like an old hand-tinted postcard.

And here's something you CAN'T do in a traditional darkroom....

Mount and frame this picture of Red Tarn and hang it on your wall. Who could tell it's not a print of an oil painting?

* * *

Even without the distortion, it would be obvious that the picture of the train and the sphinx was a fake. And even if little Charlotte were swinging from a full-sized bough instead of a twig it should be obvious that the image was built up from two different photographs. Can you see why?

It's all to do with lighting. 

First and most obvious is what is known as Colour Temperature. In both pictures, the background has the golden colours and crisp shadows of clear sunlight coming at a low angle (for those who know which way sphinxes face, it is clear that they were photographed early in the morning - bravo, Keith!), but the little girl and the train are much bluer.  

Second (and it may have been nagging you without you being able to put your finger on the cause) the directions of the light shining on Charlotte and on the train are different from the directions of the light shining on their backgrounds. In Charlotte's case, there are no shadows - it looks as if she was photographed on a bright overcast day, but the highlights on the swing and on her shoes suggest to that Keith may have used flash to help out a bit. I'll ask him.

Motto: if you are seriously trying to fake a picture, you have to be VERY careful about lighting compatibility amongst the components you patch together (now that UFO pictures are in colour rather than black & white, a lot of the faking is much easier to see). You can use a 'digital darkroom', or a traditional one, to correct the way the colours look on each component - what you can't do is change the direction of the light, or switch between clear and diffused light.

Taking the picture is only the first step, but now anyone can make simple changes that create new, exciting or amusing images. Why not give it a try?

Have fun.

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This is a Dorling Kindersley book, and Tom is Senior Lecturer in Photographic Practice at the University of Westminster, London.