Photographer admits to using Photoshop to fake award winning photo

Photographer Liu Weiqing’s award winning photo showing dozens of antelope in peaceful coexistence with a noisy high speed train rushing across the Tibetan landscape, has been exposed as a Photoshop doctored image. Shortly after it was taken in 2006, the picture was widely distributed as propaganda for China's technological feat of a train enroute to the "roof of the world" and to counterattack environmentalists concerns about the threat of the construction of the railway on the breeding grounds of the chiru, an endangered antelope species found mainly in China.

Yang Xin, an expert on antelope, suspected of the photo authenticity when he noticed that many of the antelope in the picture appeared to be pregnant and there were no young with the herd. After the photo was blown up to poster size and featured on the Beijing underground network, anonymous Chinese web user ‘Dajiala’ rubbed some dust off it and noticed "a very obvious line", evidence of digital stitching of two different images.

The photographer and his editor apologized for the scam and subsequently resigned. His award has since been revoked.