The fairy photos those little girls took a century ago fooled many people for many years. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle went to his grave believing they were real. That was just cut-outs from a book. Darkroom techniques from the 40s and 50s were quite amazing in the right hands. The only difference in what was capable today and what was capable then is that now it takes minutes to do, where then it took hours or days. People with the patience and talent and attention to detail and precision could do as good a job at faking a photo as many people could do with Photoshop these days. In some ways, it could even have been easier. Those photos were in black and white. Matching color and saturation and tint, which makes altering photos in Photoshop very difficult to make a photo look real, was not an issue. I wouldn't put any more stock in those photos being real than I would anything from today, for the same reason you don't put as much stock in today's photos because of the possibility of Photoshop work.