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Photoshop CS Adds Banknote Image Detection, Blocking?
Phosphor writes "A visitor to the Adobe Photoshop-for-Windows Forum (registration required to post, can log in as guest) has described a curious 'feature' with Photoshop 8 (also known as 'CS'). Seems this latest version of Adobe's flagship product has the built-in ability to detect that an image is of American currency. Something has been built into Photoshop's core coding that can detect something in images of currency and will prevent the user from opening the file. Apparently it will also do this with Euro notes; info on other currency is pending." According to other online reports, the latest version of Paint Shop Pro has similar restrictions, also known about since late last year.
Because those measures still fail. Especially in dark places like bars where it's hard to see the anti-counterfeiting measures in the bills. Pass a half-decent phony note on a busy night, and you're almost guaranteed to get away with it.
this has been pulled of with high-quality scanners and printers in the past - just copy the note on fairly thick printer paper, then distress it a bit to give it the texture of a used bill. Hence the reason why this is being built into better scanners and laser printers nowadays. Consumer inkjet printers are also good enough to do this, but don't have the electronics to do any decent detection. This is probably the reason it's being built into Photoshop now.
Well, if you'd check the links in the news item you'd notice this is an enforcement of the law.
Plus the problem seems to only crop up when you go to print, so Photoshop isn't imposing any restrictions greater than the law does. You can still view and edit to your hearts content on the computer.
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
I just scanned in a 10 dollar US bill (With Photoshop 6) and then saved it as jpeg, and then tried to open it with Photoshop CS. As far as I could tell, there was no problem opening it.
I did this with about 600 dpi resolution. I'm not sure if it supposed to do this by color or by shape, but it seems to me to be complete horseshit. If it isn't, it definately isn't implemented very well. This was a new 10 BTW.
If this feature does indeed exist, it seems to be fooled very easily. If this works for anyone, try negating the image and seeing if it opens then. I would guess it can tell if it's money by the color and negating it would let it pass.
Point is I have seen and still see plenty of ads in wich bank notes are displayed. So how are you now supposed to make that art?
If this is true and I smell april fool then I think this is a sign of insanity. Criminals won't be stopped by this.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Well if you crumple and then scan them then they won't look right when printed back to paper.
The government has mandated that all copiers user a particular frequency of light when they copy. Every copier/scanner is supposed to use that frequency. When that frequency of light is put onto our US currency, I have forgetten whether it's because of the ink, or perhaps a pattern they have on the bills, but in any case, they won't show up.
There's all sorts of hidden things in the currency, especially the new one, hidden steganographic details etc, to make them harder to counterfeit.
Photoshop 6 to print my bills.
I tested the Mac PS CS version and it had no problems scanning and opening a 600DPI file of the new $20. And before anyone subpoenas /. for my personal data, I only copied one side, never printed it, and destroyed the data afterwards, which is perfectly legal.
I thought it might be part of the Digimarc plugin, I usually delete those but I forgot to do it on the new version. So it's not part of Digimarc, they're present on my machine's installation of Photoshop. I guess this currency-detection thing is only on the PeeCee version.
oh yeah it's fuckin invasive
once I did a "before and after" when installing Photoshop 7 on OSX.
That shit littered the whole hard drive. It changed an OSX system sound file (submarine), it added hidden files all over the place, it wrote into resource forks...and even if you wipe all of this away it still remembers you when you reinstall. My theory is all that other stuff is just a decoy, it really writes stuff into unused parts of the hard drive.
I only use PS for work purposes, on a separate computer. I would *NEVER* install any of that shit on my home computer, just out of principal. My computer belongs to *ME* and the software companies shouldn't litter it with secret notes to themselves.
And since this is "accepted practice", and computers are getting more and more complicated, it means we can expect more and more of this. Sad.
It is a bit offtopic... But, I think Australian and New Zealand notes are far better than anyone else in terms of anti-counterfeit measures. Both are made of plastics, with transparent windows and other features.
This is no urban legend. Read the thread on the Adobe forum where I (UID "Phosphor" was taken here, had to come up with something else) talked about my discovery that currency recognition routines are in place on high-end color copiers. I discovered this in 1996 or '97, and the machine was a Canon something-or-other. Apologies for the lack of specifics, but I'm sure currency detecting routines are installed on most new color copiers these days.
My Human Gets Me Blues.
No, I read the part that didn't require registration:
As an experiment I tried to copy an print one of the new $20 bills. Before you say I am breaking the law by doing so read the web site referenced at the end of note. I fully intend to obey the rules. I was able to do a full scan at 1600 DPI using Photoshop CS (ver 8.0) and save the resulting image to the hard drive.
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
I did some more tests. Not only will this stop opening an image such as this image, but it will also NOT allow pasting any significant portions of the above image, or !!! not even let you paste in a SCREENSHOT of windows image viewer opening that said image.
Wow! They must be doing these does-this-look-like-money checks on every operation on the image that involves getting image data from outside the application! Crazy.
However, editing images of currency is quite useful. For example, many images of the Euro currency were shown to the public trough various media before its introduction.
This was supported by both the government and the retailers, to increase acceptance of the new currency. Furthermore, spreading images of money can aid in detecting counterfeit banknotes by the public - how should someone know what a 500 euro banknote looks like if no one is allowed to print an image of it, or even show one online?
Since I work in the graphical sector, I used images of currency sometimes, mostly for decorative purposes. This has absolutely nothing to do with counterfeiting, but does need the advanced editing features photoshop has. To make counterfeit money, you would just have to print a good copy, which can be performed by any simple image editing program.
No registration is required for the Adobe forums link - use "Enter as guest" or equivalent.
Probably not, this was one of the earliest models of color copiers. I think they changed the behavior, someone elsewhere in this thrad said they now just print a black rectangle instead of your banknote document.
.. which is linked from the site the error message refers you to says you CAN make full-colour copies of US currency, as long as the image is single-sided and at least 75% smaller or 150% larger than a real note.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
You can change old notes at a bank in most cases. If you get one so old that you need to take it to the Bank of England itself (which will change them no matter how old) then you may want to stick it on eBay instead :-)
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
Theres already enough advertising anyway, and promoting gambling is bad anyway (as it encourages gambling addiction, so they are doing us a favor for that too.. And adobe have the right to do whatever they want with their software, and they dont need to disclose what they do with it either, it is their personal right. If software manufacturors listed everything their software could and could not do, the packaging would be bland. If adobe wants to screw it up entirely, and make it so its completely disfunctional, they legally and morally can.. word will spread its a bad product, thats the way it works.
% pwd /Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS/Adobe Photoshop CS.app/Contents/MacOSClassic
% strings Adobe\ Photoshop\ CS | grep -i banknote
$$$/Open/Alert/Level1=This application does not support the unauthorized processing of banknote images.^r^rFor more information, select the information button below for Internet-based information on restrictions for copying and distributing banknote images or go to www.rulesforuse.org.
So it's definately in there, but does it work? I don't know.
The watermark detection has been a feature of Photoshop for quite a while - since 4.0 if I recall correctly.
MT.
-MT.
Have you heard about Woz and his sheet of $2 bills?. If you like carrying $2 bills, then consider going the whole hog and really getting to know the local law enforcement personel.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
Yep, just confirmed it myself.
N ew -100Euro(N)-2002-donatedpw_f.jpg
I did a simple google search, and downloaded the first image of a banknote I could find:
http://aes.iupui.edu/rwise/banknotes/euro/EuroP
I get the "this software does not support the unauthorized proccessing of currency" message. And may I ask how it knows its unauthorized?
Can anyone comment on the legality of cracking such a protection? It would seem insane any sane legal system to forbid me to instruct my own CPU to carry our a few NOP's instead of a CJNE, but as the DMCA has proved, many countries do not have sane legal systems.
Time and time again it is generally not the ink but the paper that most needs duplication when attempting counterfeit.
:-)
Well duh, don't you know how to bleach a fiver and print a twenty on top?
Too bad Bush has driven the greenback so low it's useless in the rest of the world.
2) If the law says "thou shalt not make a product that can copy money", then Adobe would be exhibiting gross negligence (at the very least) if their product was in fact able to produce lifelike copies of money.
I suspect very, very few people would ever realise that Photoshop was "crippled" in this way.
1. Open image in ImageReady :D
2. Click import to Photoshop
3. Use image until you're hearts content
Enjoy. Adobe are dumbasses.
Naked People Detection Algorithm
With 10 minutes work on the jpeg, it appears that there is no testing during the processing of the image, but SOLELY during the import operations (convert to ps internal format routine).
The import routine can be defeated with a 3degree shear of the original image - then the image can be sheared back in again.
But of course this isn't to stop counterfeiters and never was. It is to protect Adobe from new laws of responsibility.
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
For those of you curious about how this algorithm detects a banknote, here is a slide of a short talk that I gave to our local research group soon after I discovered the "EURion Constellation" two years ago while experimenting with a new Xerox color photocopier and a 10 euro note:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/eurion.pdf
The algorithm looks in the blue channel of a color image for little circles and most likely examines the distance distribution encountered. I have discovered a small constellation of just five circles (a bit like Orion with the belt starts merged) that will be rejected by a Xerox color photocopier installed next door from here as a banknote. Black on white circles do not work.
These little yellow, green or orange 1 mm large circles have been on European banknotes for many years. I found them on German marks, British pounds and the euro notes. In the US, they showed up only very recently on the new 20$ bill. On some notes like the euro, the circles are blatantly obvious, whereas on others the artists carefully integrated them into their design. On the 20 pound note, they appear as "notes" in an unlikely short music score, in the old German 50 mark note, they are neatly embedded into the background pattern, and in the new 20 dollar bill, they are used as the 0 of all the yellow 20 number printed across the note. The constellation are probably detected by the fact that the squares of the distances of the circles are integer multiples of the smallest one.
I have later been told that this scheme was invented by Omron and that the circle patter also encodes the issuing bank.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
This has the feel of an urban ledgend here.
First of all, the $1 bill hasn't changed for over fifty years (except for some signatures on the bottom of the bill). It is still pretty much identical to even when it was a Silver Certificate (pre WWII currency) although there were several (subtle) changes made when it became a Federal Reserve Note. Several $1 bank notes issued in the 19th Century by the US Treasury could probabally still be used today because of the similarity of the bill design, and it would be identifiable as a $1 bill.
Almost all of the new redesign efforts have been with the $20, $50, and $100 demoninations. Higher denominations do exist for US currency but are restricted from use by ordinary citizens (by IMHO stupid laws but that is another story). So if this was a genuine forgery it was never with a $1 bill.
In addition, you are suggesting that this bank note was passed outside the USA (hence the involvement of the Polish Police and not the US Secret Service) and it was done just after the release of the new currency when anybody is still trying to recognize the new bills. Keep in mind, if it was a forgery of one of the new notes, it would go through a bunch more review and be checked out more, simply because of the novelty of the note. That is not something a forger would really want to have happen.
Also, when you talk about "US Police Experts" you need to describe which of the 10,000 police agencies in the USA they were from? There are seven (yes, 7) local (not a part of the US federal government) police agencies with seperate budgets, different government bodies that they report to, and independent juristiction authorities that govern what happens when I walk out my front door in a small backwater part of the USA. There may even be more, but I don't know the names of all of them. I do know that the Secret Service (yes, the same agency that also acts as presidential body guards) does have personnel based in American Embassies to help assist governments that the USA has diplomatic relations with to examine US currency and to facilitate currency exchange with those countries. (not directly, but to encourage the exchange and otherwise authenticate US currency outside the US territorial boundaries).
That said, I have seen news reports of someone drawing out on paper with just a ball-point pen a copy of US currency. It was even called "art" and has been appraised to be more valuable than the denomination that was reproduced. Is this what you mean by "hand-made"?
Because of the ubiquity of the dollar, you will find staff around the world whose job it is to monitor counterfeiting of the greeenback.
Ok,
I had a bit of a play with your jpg (thanks BTW). It seems that its looking for certain features - if you open it in paint and then cut and paste there is a limit on the size of the "chunks" you can paste in. Especially from the face or the shield. However by taking small enough bits (9 or 10) you can cut and paste the whole image in.
inverting and rotating (as far as paints minimal abilites go) have no effect.
Run the GIMP off Knoppix. I think it's included.
Install the win32 version. Last I tried that, you had to install gtk+ separately so that's not as easy as a double click on an rpm, but it's not rocket science either. A bigger problem is that gtk+ for Windows doesn't have a lot of developer resources (basically a one man show. It has quirks and crash bugs in addition to looking and acting unlike your Windows apps.
Still, if you've got a magazine cover or something mostly complete and then find that your $700 software won't let you add those twenties, one of these options could save your ass.
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
"A gun is a tool, Marian. No better, no worse than any other tool. An axe, a shovel, or anything." Shane (1953)
I've run into this firsthand with a Canon copier, back around 1997 or so. According to the field tech that was called out for the incident, here's how it works:
The currency detection algorithm will print a black box over anything that it flags, and each time it does, it increments a counter that makes the detection algorithm more sensitive than it was before. Once that counter hits a certain magic number (apparently the actual number is not disclosed to anyone outside the manufacturer), the copier shuts down and a service call is required to re-activate it.
The field tech is is required to ask for a sample of the item that was being copied before entering the reactivation code, and the service provider is then required to file a report with the feds, along with the sample, I'm presuming.
Here's the kicker: very color copier prints a machine-readable watermark on every page it outputs in yellow toner carrying its manufacturer and serial number - you can see it with a loupe if you look hard enough (it looks like a line of morse code).
In our case, the suspect image had no resemblance whatsoever to currency of any form - what set it off was a dark green background color that was used that must have come too close to the green used in US bills. We were able to re-print the job by adjusting the color slightly with no problems once the copier was reset.
One user posted that this image wont open in Photosop CS. And while it won't, it dose open in Adobe Image Ready 8, which comes with Photosop CS. All you do is open the image in Image Ready, then hit Open In Photoshop (bottom of menu) or (Shift + Ctrl + M). Bingo, banknote in photoshop. Sorry if this has already been posted.
This one is specific to US bills and this one is the parent site.
Standard professional printing resolution is 300dpi (dots per inch) so your bill comes in at roughly 1831 x 767 pixels.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Using the image linked in the post I'm replying to, I was able to paste into Imageready CS and then switch from Imageready to Photoshop CS with no problems. I'm using OS X. Interesting.
You are not a lawyer and too lazy to click the links above that go to the fed website with the real regulations. You CAN make images of US Currency, and you CAN PRINT them if you follow the regulations. RTFA
High end Xerox copiers have this - they won't accurately reproduce the dot pattern/color scheme in US currency (I forget the exact details, I first read about this at least a couple years ago). There were some rumors about the copier watermarking "suspect" copies like currency as well. These were the very high end professional machines, like the kind used in print shops, not your regular office copiers.
A continuous-tone image (photographic image) might look ok at ~100 dpi (or 36 pixels per cm) on your screen but it will be painfully obvious that it's a scan when you print it - even on a crappy 300 dpi laser or inkjet. You'll see the pixels.
A glossy magazine image, printed at a 150 or 175 line screen, is usually 300 dpi relative to the output size. But that's a halftone image - little dots and rosettes. If something consists mostly of line art - like an engraved bank note, you'll see stairstep "jaggies" visible to the naked eye until you get up into at least the 900 dpi range.
If I were attempting to accurately reproduce currency, I'd scan at the highest resolution my scanner could handle - around 4000 to 8000 dpi for a professional drum scanner.
Take a look at your currency - some of the decorative borders, such as the one around the portrait, are actually very small text, which becomes illegible if photocopied or scanned at low resolution. And for this purpose, 600 dpi is low resolution. 100 dpi would be garbage.
Somebody with lots of experience with various graphics software could sit down and write a thorough description of ideal user interface, and write a description of how the existing Gimp menus should be reshuffled to the ideal form and what's the reason for every change. The biggest problem in programming is to figure out what the users want; this way the requested changes should be easy to implement.
Interesting. I went and scanned a used bill at 300 dpi on another machine with a $3,000 Epson scanner and it opened right up in CS on this machine. But, your linked image did not open, not even as a screenshot. I work for a textbook company and we have photo CDs of bills that we use in our Math books. Those images also opened up fine.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Just do a search for "money" at gettyimages and see how many stock photos come up and how diversely creative they are. I'm a graphic designer and one of my clients is a bank. I have done many posters, billboards, brochures, etc with various images of $100's or $20's or just big stacks of cash. I even once scanned a $1 bill and used the border for a coupon I designed. The printer even printed several thousand with green ink at actual size. It was only a one side print job with other text in the center and was obviously not real currency.
Checking out one of the links from another post (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/eurion.pdf). You can open up this pdf in Photoshop 8 (Photoshop will rasterize it and display it fine), but once you save it as a tiff from Acrobat, and reopen it in Photoshop, it restricts you. Incidently, a copy saved as a jpg works fine in Acrobat.
1. No copier will allow you to print currency - you get the black box the first time you try. If you keep trying, the copier becomes less selective as to what it puts a black box over, up to the shutdown point.
2. While the unlock code could very well be static, it's more likely that it is a challenge/response hash - the copier gives the tech a random code, the tech then calls it into the manufacturer who gives the tech the corresponding unlock code. I do remember the tech calling in to his office during the service call, but I wasn't listening in.
Sometimes having worked in Govenrment and staying in the political loop has its benefits for me.. After a short discussion with the Secret Service Public Affairs office in Washington, DC, today I believe that I am safe in providing the following information. To quote from the US Secret Service website at : "The Counterfeit Detection Act of 1992, Public Law 102-550, in Section 411 of Title 31 of the Code of Federal Regulations, permits color illustrations of U.S. currency provided: 1. the illustration is of a size less than three-fourths or more than one and one-half, in linear dimension, of each part of the item illustrated; 2. the illustration is one-sided; and 3. all negatives, plates, positives, digitized storage medium,graphic files, magnetic medium, optical storage devices, and any other thing used in the making of the illustration that contain an image of the illustration or any part thereof are destroyed and/or deleted or erased after their final use." For those in other nations you may find links to your applicable regulations at: Which is also where the PhotoShop CS error and PaintShop Pro error take you automatically to. If you want to test this out yourself. I am posting a copy of a US Government currency exemplar published SPECIMEN version of the new 2004 series $20 note, as well as JPEG images of BOTH the PhotoShop CS and PaintShop Pro 8 error messages, for TECHNOLOGY and media information purposes ONLY.. ALL and ANY INDIVIDUALS who download this image are responsible for their own actions and agree that they shall use this image ONLY for the technology demonstration purposes intended AND that they will destroy the file after it is used to demonstrate said technology. Downloading the file is at your own risk, and I accept no responsibility for your actions, use, or possession of said file or its contents. The file is at: http://www.krebs2003.com/adobe%20test%20image.zip Beyond that, I can only say that when I did bring up the issue of how PhotoShop CS was dealing with the image, no-one at the Secret Service seemed surprised.. They seemed, not surprisingly, more interested in some workaround I had discovered, which I have promised NOT to discuss. ;-)
Keith
Whenever you open an image photoshop loads that image into memory. To facilitate editing it collects information such as, Hue, Saturation, Histograms of the channels, contrast . . .(see the Image>Adjust[ments] menu). I downloaded your image and sure enough, pasting it into PS CS OS X brought up this alert window.
Since Adobe doesn't release any half decent contour tracing software(streamline hasn't been updated since the days of windows 95 and even then it was very crude) I was fairly certain it wasn't doing any kind of shape anaylasis. Using Illustrator 10 I shifted the color on the same image (using various blend modes from the transparency palette) and found that even minor hue shifts change the bill enough to be opened. Putting a 28% opaque color field in front of the bill changes it enough, and in my quick experimenting It doesn't seem to react adversely when I adjust it back to the correct range.Oddly the test I did that, to my eye changed the bill the most (think bright yellow and kelly green as opposed to peach and lime green) did
I don't have a good scanner in front of me now, but some variation on these tactics would probably work on hi res files, since the low res ones tripped up the alarm. I am curious about the millimeter diameter circles in the blue channel noted in another poster's comment though.