Spotting a fake iPhone image.

While I was reading a BGR article on tablets, their side panel indicated that the most popular story on BGR was about next-generation iPhone photos leaked from a Chinese site.  I find it implausible that, so far in advance of any possible new iPhone, that a ready-to-manufacture device would be floating around.  So I clicked to see what was going on, fully expecting fake images.  I was not disappointed.

The images were impressive, but nonetheless they were renderings.  Let me point out the flaws that gave this particular image away.

There are many flaws, these are most of them.

Pumping up the exposure and gamma in Photoshop can reveal the edits and flaws.

1. Scale and details in the wood material matters.  If you look at the wood pattern and then at the phone, the two are at different scales -- the slats are less than 1/2" wide, if you go by the scale of the phone, but the slats have the details of wood that is about 2" wide.  If you look very closely, the supporting structure below the wood slat faces, implies that the slats are extremely thin and repeated often.  That's the sign that someone applied a photograph as a texture, and inappropriately so.  This is a wood floor texture, not a wood table top texture.
2. Reflections do not match up.  The side walls, which are implied to also extend to the top and bottom face of the rear of the phone, reflects strongly on the horizontal faces, but not on the vertical faces.  In the vertical face, the reflections do not match up to the adjacent wood.
3. Blemish artifacts.  Post editing of an image can often be highlighted by pumping up the exposure and gamma in Photoshop, where blurs might otherwise be difficult to detect.
4. Construction of a model must be plausible.  The glass of a modern smart phone is under a millimeter thick, but in this case, the slot for the receiver (hearing) implies that the surface material is more than 1mm thick, which does not match.  Further, there is a metal surround of the slot, which is not how the phone would be constructed.  There would not be any thin metal surround; instead the glass would simply have a clean, chamfered edge.
5. Real LED flash and cameras have depth to them.  Image textures cannot effectively replicate depth, especially when portraying objects behind glass.  The flash looks like someone placed a sticker on the face of the phone, while the lens of the camera is perfectly centered, but in real life it would be slightly offset.  If you click through to the website source, another image shows how they tried to cover up the imperfection of the lens image texture that was used, by trying to obscure it.
6. Edges have to match the material.  If you've seen an iPhone's glass edge, they are chamfered and have a peculiar reflection (and refraction) of light.  In this case, the edges look more like metal with specular reflections or worn edges of metal.  Neither would apply to the glass edges of the iPhone.  Also, if these edges were supposed to be reflections, they do not match up to the metal band's edges that are adjacent.  

This is a really good rendering, but even with the best renderings, you can usually find some flaws.  Another decade and this might not be the case, though -- each iteration of rendering software makes it harder to tell the difference.