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Adobe Is Censoring The Images That You Open

Posted: Sat Jan 10, 2004 3:14 am
by Roo
Currency,Disney and God know what else.

Read about it here in this thread at the Adobe Win Forums.

(You'll need to register)

Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 12:01 am
by HaraldHeim
Thanks for your interesting post. I thought this was a joke at first, but it is reality. Big Brother is watching you!

If you wants to convince yourself that Photoshop CS, Paint Shop Pro 8 and some other applications don't let you open bank notes from various countries, here is a sample of a euro note that can be found with Google's Image Search: http://www.gov.ie/ecbi-euro/pics/big_100r.gif
So far Internet Explorer still keeps displaying and printing such images :-).

This all sounds quite ridiculous. Do they really think this will stop counterfeiters? It probably makes it even more fun for them.

Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 1:14 am
by emerald_angel_1975
PhotoImpact XL, PhotoImpact CS, and PSP8 all allow me to open it when I save it to my hard drive first but not if I attempt to copy it from the web browser and paste as a new image. Very interesting!

Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 5:02 am
by Guest
It has to be 2004 bills. And in thier 'officail' statements that you'll find out there now that they have been forced to come clean you'll find that they say Ulead is also using this 'secrect technology', I have heard that Jasc is using it as well.

If you read through that loooooong and ever growing thread you'll find that it is NOT illeglle!

Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 11:54 am
by HaraldHeim
This bank note detection technology seems even less effective and even more ridiculous than one might think at first. There are a lot of bank note images on Google Image Search that cause no problem when opened in PSP8 or Photoshop CS. It probably only affects bank note images that you can find on government web sites.

There is no problem scanning bank notes and opening them in JPG format is also possible. Only if they are in GIF, BMP or other lossless format, they are blocked. Which counterfeiter would be so silly to use a official bank note image to produce facked bank notes?

This technology is developed by Digimarc, so what this code in Photosghop CS and PSP8 does is to search for a watermark in the bank note images. But this watermark has to be added at frist to the image to make it work. And saving such an image in a lossy image format like JPG removes the watermark.

I wonder how much money and time was wasted on developing and implementing this useless technology.

Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2004 10:23 pm
by BetrayerX
I can confirm that CS does not open the image you posted.

I really hate to be restricted with what I read and see. I pay for a program to do a job. EDIT images and that's what I expect to do.

If anyone can hint me on how to remove this it'll be deeply appreciated.

Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2004 11:59 pm
by HaraldHeim
Just save the image as a JPG file. Photoshop CS won't argue when you then open the JPG file.

Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2004 8:11 pm
by regretela
I just opened it in Adobe Image Ready no problem, but it wouldn't open in Photoshop CS in any format, until the original Gif file was saved as a JPEG (in ACDSee) then opened and resized by ACDSEE Real Optimizer and saved again as a JPEG. It also opened in CS when the original GIF was saved as a JPEG (in ACDSee), then saved again as a JPEG, overwriting the previous save.
When I looked further into it, I found that the first save into JPEG (in ACDSEE) was a file size of 66.2 kb. After the second save with ACDSEE the file size was 66.8. The original GIF was 22.6, a TIFF file was 50.3, and a BMP was 49.7 - none of which would open in CS.
So, not only do you have to save it as a JPEG, but the file has to be resized as well.
My conclusion is, if you want to open and edit currency images in photoshop CS, they must be saved into JPEG format TWICE before they will open in CS. Might as well just do it in a different, less restrictive editor, or use Image Ready. Why do I feel like Big Brother is watching? :-?

Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2004 9:25 pm
by HaraldHeim
It probably depends on the compression rate. If you use a very small compression rate, the watermark isn't damaged. If you use a higher compression, the watermatrk is damaged.

Also if you resize an image, the watermark is damaged, too. Same if you apply a blur effect, but the blur effect has to be quite strong, so it doesn't help either.

Probably much better would be to apply uniform noise to an image. The noise intensity can probably be quite low, so that the noise wouldn't be visible at 100% zoom. Watermarks themselves hide as such low intensity noise, so adding a similar, but random noise should destroy them.