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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.
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.
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.
.. 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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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.
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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.
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.