Does PhotoShop Mean We Can't We Trust What We See?

An op-ed piece in Newsday today by Ken Light, curator of the Center for Photography at the University of California, Berkeley, and a documentary photographer, asks if we can trust what we see.

Ken writes:

"Anybody with Internet access and an interest in John Kerry has probably seen my photograph by now, or the part of it that I made.

The other part is a fake, a visual lie. There's an Associated Press credit down in the right corner. That's also a lie. John Kerry never shared a demonstration podium with Jane Fonda. But the fact that a widely circulated photo showed him doing so until it was exposed a few months ago as a hoax tells us a lot about the troublesome combination of the computer program PhotoShop, and others, and the Internet."

As noted earlier on this blog, newspapers are also increasingly using images shot by the general public in their stories. As PhotoShop and other digital tools get easier to use and cheaper, will this continue? Will PR people need to prove that their images are legit?