Your best bet is to have a computer expert determine for the court if the Date Taken metadata matches the date stamped onto the photo. If they match, it might mean your ex is computer savvy and changed it when he added the date stamp, so that's not especially helpful to you. But if they don't match, I'd say that's almost certainly evidence of funny business. Good luck!

Sharpen First or Second?

In my digital work flow, should I sharpen a photo and then convert/compress it to JPEG, or should I convert it to a JPEG first and then sharpen it? Why?

--Wandal Winn, Anchorage, Alaska

This is a really confusing subject, Wandal--and somewhat contentious among some photo pros and enthusiasts, so there's no single official answer. That said, the conventional wisdom is that sharpening should be the very last thing you do in your digital workflow. So do all of your ordinary editing, resize the photo if necessary, and output it to the final file format (like JPEG or TIFF). Then when you are done manipulating the pixels, apply the appropriate amount of sharpening. This is important because the amount of sharpening you apply depends upon the pixel dimensions of the image as well as the contrast within the image, and the local contrast within a photo can change slightly when you convert it from a RAW image to a JPEG. So I'd vote for sharpening last.