DVPhoto » Software

Adobe Tackles Photo Forgeries

Coolmac — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 10:36:48 +0000

Wired has an article up about how adobe plans to tackle photo forgeries. The tools they are working on? A clone stamp detection tool, a tool that will determine the camera used to take an image, and most interestingly, a tool that will check if a photo has been changed at all. This final tool manages this due to the demosaicing that bayer array cameras have to do when processing the image. Apparently this causes a colour relationship between neighbouring pixels that will most likely be destroyed when the photo is edited in Photoshop.

Since all these tools will use statistical methods to determine the authenticity of a photo, there will always be a number of false positives. Adobe are aware that this is a problem, and are going to continue working on the tools for the next 1 to 3 years before releasing them to the world, in an attempt to minimise the percentage of errors. Still no matter how good the tool are, it is likely they will return false positives now and again, so I hope the editors realise this and don’t just automatically assume the photographer is dishonest when the tools say so.

Aperture team fired, or so the rumors say.

Coolmac — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 08:34:49 +0000

Think Secret, the apple rumor site, has posted a story about the apparent recent firing of the Aperture development team.

The development of Aperture had apparently been plagued with problems, and parts of the software got given to other development teams to “to fix as best they can.” So with the team now gone, many will wonder about Apertures future.

I doubt Apple will abandon this product, but my guess is that a new development team will have to sit down and have a long hard look at what can be done to make Aperture a true Apple quality product. Expect Aperture 2.0 to take a while; but when it comes, I’m sure it will be great.

– edit: After reading some comments from other sites, it seems that while the Aperture team has been disbanded, most of the developers were just moved to other teams, with just management being asked to leave.

Photo Mechanic public Beta

Coolmac — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 07:27:06 +0000

Camera Bits is releasing a public beta of their Photo Mechanic software. So if you have never tried it before, why not pop over to the beta page and give it a whirl.

Noise Ninja for Linux and Intel Mac

Coolmac — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 07:25:20 +0000

PictureCode have released beta version 2.1.1 of their standalone Noise Ninja. This release has added native Linux and Mac Intel platform support, quality annotation auto-fill support, and jpe as valid JPEG extension. The photoshop plugin has not been updated since the main reason for this update was the addition of Linux and Mac Intel support, neither of which have Photoshop yet.

If you don’t own Noise Ninja, this is the perfect opportunity to give it a try. From the release:

Since our Noise Ninja licenses are cross platform you can use your existing Noise Ninja standalone or bundle license to unlock the release candidates on all platforms. If you do not enter a license the software will run in trial mode. If you do not already own a license key for Noise Ninja, you can also use the following temporary license key to unlock the release candidate:

Product: Noise Ninja Beta License
Expires: May 2, 2006
User name: noiseninjabeta050206
Keycode: 0202f0-f0f76f-65054a-bc0117-bbc36e