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Recovering Blurred Text Using Photoshop and JavaScript

Posted by timothy on from the careful-how-you-hide-stuff dept.

An anonymous reader writes "There's been a lot of talk about recovering blurred or pixelated text, but here's an actual implementation using nothing but Photoshop and a little JavaScript. Includes a Hollywood-esque video showing the uncovered letters slowly appearing."

3 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Just ovveride? by Dreen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I never understood why people use pixel mis-mashing when they want to obfuscate something in an image.

    drawing a big black rectangle is 10x faster and there is no way you can de-obfuscate that

  2. Failure by sexconker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "While my original goal of recovering the censored text on my friendâ(TM)s page was never achieved, the project was a success."

    I wouldn't call that a success...

    Good execution of a basic concept, but the fact remains that this shit is infeasible in practice. You have all the font issues (the typeface, the spacing, the color, the size, etc.), and you've got all the source issues - Are you sure that's text? Is it English? Was it obfuscated in other ways? Has the image been altered after the text was rendered? How has compression affected it?

    The biggest fucking issue, of course, is that you're assuming the text was obfuscated using photoshop, or at least very similar blurring/pixelating algorithms.

    It's a great project in terms of using javascript and photoshop to do something neat but basic in concept (essentially brute forcing, as the author says).

    But unless you have inside info about how the text was rendered and obfuscated, you're better off taking a step back and squinting.

    I think I see a duck.

  3. What about nipples? by vodevil · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think people would be more interested if this removed the blur from nipples.