Digital picture fraud detection is an increasing societal necessity due to the importance of verified images. The detection of picture copying, splicing, retouching, and re-sampling forgeries is included. In the absence of digital signatures or watermarks, passive picture authentication may serve as an alternative to active authentication. Passive techniques, often known as blind methods, occur without previous knowledge of the picture or its reference. Detecting picture forgery or tampering has been a study field for decades, driven by the Internet, online platforms, social media, and widespread digital image usage. Failure rate is a factor in detecting picture alteration or forgery, among other approaches. The study applies six popular machine learning algorithms to extracted features from Spatial Exploitation, Lightweight, and Residual deep learning models on benchmark datasets MICC-F220, Columbia, and CoMoFoD. The incorporated deep learning models include AlexNet, GoogleNet, VGG16, VGG19, SqueezeNet, MobileNetV2, ShuffleNet, ResNet-18, ResNet-50, and ResNet-101 for spatial exploitation. Fine-tuning is applied to the top three deep learning models, optimizing hyperparameters based on performance indicators for each benchmark dataset. Tweaked SqueezeNet, MobileNetV2, and ShuffleNet deep learning models with SGDM Optimizer and SVM classifier yielded the best results for MICC-F220 dataset. Fine-tuned VGG19, MobileNetV2, and ResNet50 deep learning models with SGDM Optimizer and SVM v classifier yielded the best results for Columbia dataset. In CoMoFoD dataset, fine-tuned AlexNet, MobileNetV2, and ShuffleNet deep learning models with SGDM Optimizer and SVM classifier yielded the best results. The proposed approach, utilizing machine learning algorithms and deep learning features, enhanced forgery detection and reduced false positives. Results were validated on benchmark image forgery datasets and compared to current methods.