  We present a thorough investigation of stellar photometry based on HST
imaging of crowded fields at 85 and 10 arcsec from the centre of the
high-surface brightness elliptical M32. The Principal Investigators of the
present archive data have elsewhere presented an impressive colour-magnitude
diagram of the field at 85 arcsec. Based on the same data we enlarge on their
photometric analysis and supplement with error estimators that more clearly
show the implications of severe image crowding on the stellar photometry. We
show that the faintest stars (I>25.0, V>26.0) are found too bright by several
tens of a magnitude. For the field at 10 arcsec we conclude that it is not
possible to obtain reliable stellar photometry, standard deviations being
larger than 0.4 mag. Artificial-star experiments show that only very few of the
brightest stars of the luminosity function can be expected to represent single
objects, the majority being either spurious or not as bright as measured.
