That’s what governments are for… get in a man’s way. — Capt. Mal Reynolds
So I did some illustrations for Backwoods Home that used money as part of the image.
One was built around a $20. Got a public domain .jpg of an Andrew Jackson off Wikipedia (serial number already carefully obscured), then manipulated, altered, edited, truncated, artified it. AND I covered it with little drawn figures. Totally legal under every possible rule of use.
All was fine until editor Annie Tuttle attempted to import the illustration into Photoshop to do the final prep to make the art print ready. Here’s what Adobe, in its infinite lack of wisdom, had to say about that:
And that was Photoshop’s final word. No go. Get lost. Never mind that this is an absolutely legal use of an image. Never mind that U.S. currency is by definition public domain. We know better than you and we’re not going to let you do it.
Annie was laughing about it at first (and she’s the one who gave that screen capture the title “big_brother_hates_art”). Only days later, riiiiight before deadline, did she remember that there was a required step for which she needed Photoshop. Uh oh.
She shot me an email that sent me scrambling. I discovered (as one commentor had already implied here) that this theatrical anti-counterfeiting nannying is common and has been built into printers, scanners, and design programs for years.
Apparently the tech looks for certain graphical “codes” built into currency (this is one of them, though not the only one; it’s all very hush-hush, you know). And when it detects them, you’re out of luck even if you’re merely an innocent graphic designer or editor.
Fortunately, my free, open-source Photoshop equivalent and my scanner/printer haven’t joined the parade of nannies.
Unfortunately, my program, the GIMP, couldn’t do the work Annie needed. At least not without me going out and getting an advanced degree in computer science, finding plug-ins whose developers have done their utmost to hide them from prying eyes, and making multiple sacrifices to a particularly evil and demanding pack of voodoo gods.
I did find a potential way to fool Photoshop into opening the file.
But by that time, Annie herself had found another way to solve the problem. So 45,000 copies of a “counterfeit $20” — that nobody but a brain-dead Little Brother acting as a government nanny could possibly mistake for an actual counterfeit $20 — will soon be heading to BHM subscribers and newsstands.
Now here’s the good part. Photoshop is made by Adobe. Photoshop says, “No, no, never!” to opening currency art. Right?
The workaround I found uses another Adobe product to persuade Photoshop to open the “counterfeit” art. The fix Annie found uses two other Adobe products to get the job done. (Annie: “Our publishing program, by the same company, let us import the bill just fine. Our pdf converter, also by the same company, converted the file fine.”)
So the takeaway from this is that Little Brothers can be just as obtrusive as the Big Brother on whose behalf they act. And just as short-sightedly incompetent at achieving what they say they want to achieve.
LOL, Adobe sounds like the government, one section doesn’t work in conjunction with the other so eventually it’s possible to get around it.
Always a win for the smarter “little people”.
That isn’t incompetence on Adobe’s part. It’s marketing. They basically sold three products to do the work of one. At a profit.
In the old days, some film processing labs used to censor what they would print. Didn’t matter if it was illegal or not, obscene or clean, there were certain pictures you took that never came back. I recall one lab added a moralistic note. Like Adobe here, corporate made the rules more restrictive than required by law. Today, Adobe may fear, maybe legitimately, that fedgov will change currency law and retroactively prosecute. Or they’re just being goody 2 shoes like the old film labs.
Side note: Like Adobe, all their efforts at censorship were for naught. Even as kids, there were workarounds. A kid in school worked in one of those censoring labs when we were in HS. He had albums full of the unprintables he showed everyone, and yes, there were people we all knew if lots of the pics. Try as I might, I could never look at Mrs Johnson in the foodstore again without seeing her in her bdsm outfit, bound, gagged and trussed to her bed. Shiver. So while Mr. Johnson never saw the pics, all us kids on the street did.
just waiting — OMG, that’s pretty funny (in a very unsettling way) about Mrs. Johnson.
And oh, the memories. The old days when we needed photo labs — performing miracles for us while we waited eagerly, making our lives more difficult than they are now.
I remember the one time a friend and I took nude pictures of each other. Very artsy. Posing in the woods like little naked fairies. We knew we didn’t dare send them to a lab, innocent though they were. No SM or B&D, I assure you. 🙂 Fortunately, I had a very gentlemanly photographer friend who processed them for me in his home lab.
LOL. Unsettling???
We were a bunch of teenagers, guys and girls. We didn’t know such proclivities existed. And the worst part? No one, no one, ever mistook Mrs. Johnson for being an attractive woman.
I think most went back to looking for boobies in the tribal pictorials in Nat Geo after that.
ps. Hobbit, sometimes there are worse punishments than getting caught!
Just waiting-yeah, there’s no brain bleach. When I was in junior high school, I had Cameroc-a camera equipped model rocket that had a disc of 400 ASA Tri-X pan in it-one photo per flight(actuated by the ejection charge on the engine). I took the film in its envelope to a camera shop, explaining what it was(it had to be developed/printed by hand). They developed the negative, but wouldn’t print the image-the guy just sort of brushed me off and charged me for developing the negative-no explanation. I took it to the school photo lab, the teacher printed it, and it was clearly an aerial shot of the field behind where I lived( could see a few houses and a barn or two). After that, the photo teacher let me use the lab(developing/printing B/W is easy-at that time, color required precise temperature controls difficult for an amateur). I never got an explanation as to what could be offensive about that photo.
AH… say no more Claire! They’ll know you know (like I do) pretty much what your workaround is… and it’ll disappear! LOL.
I no longer remember where I read it – but I saw an indepth article on a German artist, who was so good at printmaking — he was able to pull off a large amount of counterfeits that couldn’t be detected. (For awhile – a sting operation finally “proved” that suspicions were correct, when he confessed.) His process involved multiple impressions over a lithograph, and some embossing on the paper. Quite involved – but it paid better than his rather good paintings.
There is almost no way a thief – in our culture – would have the patience, skills and ingenuity to pursue the level of perfection needed to pull off something like this… even with the assistance of today’s scanners and software. Too much work, you know?
Pre-press … Know what you mean. I was worried about writing anything specific about the workarounds. But since some of them have already been online since the early 90s and they still work, I’m kinda thinkin’ all the nannying is more for show that anything.
And totally agreed on elaborate counterfeiting. Not many are going to do it*; but thousands of innocent graphic artists are going to tear their hair out because the nannies are making their jobs harder. Sigh.
* And those who do will just be doing what central banks do, but on a much less harmful scale.
Scott, if he was able to see a backyard or two, I could see where a *very* uptight processor might think you were trying to spy on a neighbor (this wouldn’t be a rocket savvy guy, by any means).
When I started my interest in photography, I ended up having to set up a home darkroom just to be sure the image I took would be what came out on paper. One roll was essentially ruined by a “pro” shop (which will go unnamed) when the processor marked out what he decided were protruding nipples on my model’s nightie. I still had the negs, but nothing to print them on. Nowadays I can comfortably take and develop as much film as I like, and while I do have a really nice enlarger, I also have a fairly inexpensive film scanner with which I can browse the photos onscreen, and better select what I’ll use my increasingly rare developing materials on.
Then, of course, I have a couple decent digital SLRs too. I think digi has done great things for creative freedom, in the above respects anyway.