The camera may never lie, but new technology is enabling it to bend the truth occasionally. Some of today’s smartest snappers can instantly rewrite history by cheering up frowning portraits, knocking a few pounds (or years) off loved ones and even adding a splash of continental colour to dull British skies.

If you’re tired of taking pictures of a scowling teenager, for instance, Sony’s new Cyber-shot DSC-W150 camera, which has just gone on sale, comes with Happy Face Retouch, an editing feature that locates and eradicates frowns at the touch of a button. Don’t expect particularly convincing results, though, as smiling is about more than just curving the corners of your mouth, and when the rest of your face doesn’t follow it can make you look as though you’ve overdone the Botox.

Equally aspirational is HP’s slimming tool, an editing option on its Photosmart R937 camera that takes a digital knife to generous waistlines. Again, the effect is more fun-house mirror than Harley Street surgeon, but visitors to your Facebook page won’t know what you look like anyway.

Anyone who can’t afford a personal make-up artist might instead consider investing in Fujifilm’s FinePix F100fd camera. In Portrait Enhancer mode it smooths away annoying wrinkles faster than you can say “antiageing cream”.

These features have become possible because of the increased computing power of modern digital cameras. When you take a picture, processing chips go to work to hone colours and sharpen or smooth detail.

Camera companies want us to be happy with our pictures – it’s the best way for them to get us buying and using more cameras – and that doesn’t necessarily mean producing a realistic depiction of what lies before the lens. Who wouldn’t want their holiday snaps to look warmer, their spouse younger and their kids happier? “We want our cameras to put emotion in images,” admits Jeremy Gilbert, Nikon UK’s marketing manager, “not just capture the cold, hard light of day.”

The days of manually adjusting f-stops and shutter speeds are long gone, and the automatic program modes of cameras are getting ever more sophisticated. Several cameras (including models by Sony and Kodak) continuously analyse the scene in front of them. If they recognise trees and buildings, they’ll emphasise sharpness and colour, while flowers may trigger close-up focusing and faces will prompt flatteringly smooth reproduction.

In fact, some camera companies have decided we can’t even be trusted to press the shutter. Cameras by Sony and Olympus now have a Smile Shutter option – you roughly frame a scene, then rely on the camera to trip the shutter when it detects that everyone is grinning.

So is the art of photography dead? “You’re assuming that consumers want to make decisions in photography, and we don’t think they do,” Gilbert says. “Photography used to be a hobby.

Now recording your life is the requirement and photography is just part of that process.”

HP is trialling advanced image manipulation technologies online, using the customer base of its internet printing website as guinea pigs. At www.snapfishlab.com you can try one-click solutions to wonky horizons, poor framing and much more. When these functions find their way into tomorrow’s cameras, you could find yourself unable to take a bad picture, even if you wanted to.

Unless, of course, you forget to take the lens cap off.

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