There are two great examples of this – the first are HDR images.

These ‘High Dynamic Range’ images are produced by combining three (or more) images of the same scene, one taken very dark, one neutral and one very light – combined cleverly and they can produce a hyper-real image of the scene.

Now allot of the images you now see touted as HDR are coloured to look unrealistic and paranormal, but a true HDR image is just a /more accurate/ representation of the scene.

I couldn’t find any online quickly, but the best examples are ariel photography (one professional photographer did a set over Turin IIRC) and they look like scale models. If you didn’t know better you would /swear/ that they weren’t real.

The other example that sprung to mind was a band called The Dragons
http://www.last.fm/music/The+Dragons/+wiki

These were a bunch of session musicians (who became very well known) in the 60s/70s. When they were young they recorded an album which was never released.

30 years later the master tapes were discovered by DJ Food of ninjatune. He remastered them and the album was finally released. Allot of people simply didn’t believe it was real, and were convinced it was a marketing hoax – the production was too slick, it didn’t sound liek a 30 year old recording, it didn’t sound like it had been recorded on late 60s kit.

It was such a good quality recording, with such good production by DJ Food people actually did their won digging and investigating to convince themselves that it was real.

You said that slick images are likely to be automatically discounted – like the fictional movie you referenced. This makes perfect sense to me, life isn’t slick. Like when I see a gorgeous model, I assume she’s had cosmetic surgery, she’s been airbrushed/photoshopped, or both. The women I see every day don’t look like that. When I see car ads that have the perfectly smooth and uniform glossy car hood, I know they’ve been photographed in unreal settings, photoshopped, or both – not even the new cars I see look that good. So I’d say this is a rational response.

On the other hand, since rumpled images are harder to substantiate, it would make sense to me. It seems to me that being skeptical about rumpled images would make sense given edits are harder to discover, but then again they often look more like what we see or expect to see. If there is an image of a car exploding in the middle east, I assume the photographer didn’t have time to set up the camera on a tripod and do a nice long exposure. I expect jitter, blur, and shakiness.

Anyhow, I just came here to say that I think our expectations are rational. Maybe that leaves us more vulnerable to deception, but at some point you have to take people’s word for it – you really can’t be totally skeptical of everything without rejecting all information presented that you didn’t see, which really paralyzes you on making decisions.