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Is photo real or a fake? Digital manipulation adds to US prosecution costs and can delay trials

Each week, about 100,000 sexually explicit digital images of children arrive at Michelle Collins' office. They are sent by police and prosecutors who hope Collins and her analysts at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children can verify that the pictures are not computer-generated. When they can't, officials sometimes turn to outside experts.

All this is being done -- at an annual cost in the millions of dollars collectively in child-pornography cases alone -- as software like Photoshop makes it easier to fake photos and as juries become more skeptical about what they see.

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