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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.
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.
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.
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.
No registration is required for the Adobe forums link - use "Enter as guest" or equivalent.
.. 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.
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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 $2 bills, then consider going the whole hog and really getting to know the local law enforcement personel.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
2) If the law says "thou shalt not make a product that can copy money", then Adobe would be exhibiting gross negligence (at the very least) if their product was in fact able to produce lifelike copies of money.
I suspect very, very few people would ever realise that Photoshop was "crippled" in this way.
For those of you curious about how this algorithm detects a banknote, here is a slide of a short talk that I gave to our local research group soon after I discovered the "EURion Constellation" two years ago while experimenting with a new Xerox color photocopier and a 10 euro note:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/eurion.pdf
The algorithm looks in the blue channel of a color image for little circles and most likely examines the distance distribution encountered. I have discovered a small constellation of just five circles (a bit like Orion with the belt starts merged) that will be rejected by a Xerox color photocopier installed next door from here as a banknote. Black on white circles do not work.
These little yellow, green or orange 1 mm large circles have been on European banknotes for many years. I found them on German marks, British pounds and the euro notes. In the US, they showed up only very recently on the new 20$ 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"?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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