Filed under: Design, Photo, Windows, Macintosh, Adobe
How to scan money in Photoshop
by Jordan Running May 5th 2006 at 9:50AM
Photoshop has a charming "feature" that prevents you from importing images of money. It's an
anti-counterfeiting measure of dubious value, and if you're a designer who wants to make fair use of images of money in
a piece, the restriction is a huge pain. Fortunately, there's a way around it, as described by Deke McClelland in this
video at O'Reilly's Digital Media blog. It's a
really easy trick that basically boils down to this: Every version of Photoshop comes with ImageReady. ImageReady
doesn't have any anti-counterfeiting technology, and Photoshop implicitly trusts anything ImageReady sends its way.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Johnnyg0 said 11:44AM on 5-05-2006
How does it know the image is "money", does it work only on US money or Canadian or worldwide money as well?
.. either way it must take a hell of an algorithm to do that, and if this is possible, then everything should be able to be recognized by computers, and I mean EVERYTHING.
Oooh, quiet world with no monitoring, I thing I'll miss you.
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Johnnyg0 said 11:45AM on 5-05-2006
ooops,.. think, I meant think :)
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Jordan Running said 11:59AM on 5-05-2006
Well, Johnny, think about facial recognition. Computers can do facial recognition pretty consistently, even though faces have an unlimited number of expressions and positions. Bills, on the other hand, are two-dimensional and apart from wrinkles, marks and wear, always look exactly the same (and remember that a counterfeiter would always use a bill in the best condition to make copies of). Compared to face recognition, currency recognition is a trivially easy task.
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John Laur said 1:24PM on 5-05-2006
Apparently the detection algorithm involves looking for a specific 'constellation' pattern; on the new bills this is in the pattern of the yellow 0's on the back of 10's and 20's. The actual implementation; however, is something of a secret and often implemented in a 'black box' sort of way. The particular constellation pattern is not unique to American money, though and is used on many countries' bills.
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junyo said 1:32PM on 5-05-2006
Well, there has to be a way to do it rather simply, higher end copiers have had this sort of anticopying recognition for a while. The color Canon's and Toshiba's I put in at my old job would automatically distort the image of any money you tried to copy, and i was told that was by design.
Of course any attempted 'money copying' was purely for training/educational purposes...
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Diddle said 4:45PM on 5-05-2006
I just scanned my Twonie and copy/pasted it all over a JPG for my desktop so I can feel richer even if I'm broke.
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hitkaiser said 11:57PM on 5-07-2006
Thats terribly cool, makes me wanna try it straight away... sigh if only I had a scanner at hand... what exactly does photoshop do when it detects money? Does it simply not let u.. or does it do something to the image?
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Claudiu Spulber said 5:30AM on 5-08-2006
I didn't know that Photoshop doesn't let you import money images. I'm also curious if it blocks images only for dollars/euro, or they have such a perfomant engine to block other currencies too?
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Christian Glz said 2:27PM on 5-08-2006
I will try to scan a 50 pesos mexican note, be right back with the result.
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Deke McClelland said 2:10AM on 5-11-2006
My understanding is that it works like this: In cooperation with governments, security, and software firms, the International Bank has devised an elaborate matrix of recognizable patterns that may be embedded into the design of paper currency. The matrix includes the yellow circles mentioned earlier, as well as a variety of lightly colored waving lines and subtly patterned background images. This matrix has worked its way into the new US bills, as well as all Euros, English pound notes, and who knows how many other currencies. The International Bank petitions tech developers such as Adobe to incorporate its scan detection protocol. Adobe added it to Photoshop, which satisfied all parties, but omitted it from ImageReady and other Adobe apps. Hence the potential for madcap humor in dekePod.
Given the fair-use options, and the many workarounds (the one I show in dekePod is just one of several), I am skeptical of software's ability to limit counterfeiting. Those that have successfully counterfeited money have done much more than scan it, clean it up in Photoshop, and print it two-sided on sheets of 20-pound bond. The real savvy bad boys weave and watermark their own paper and print the ink in layers, frequently using old-school presses. I might recommend spending less effort constraining fair-use activities and more effort looking for guys who are etching lithgraphic plates to resemble real money.
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Claudiu Spulber said 3:08AM on 5-11-2006
Good information Deke. They should apply the principle "keep the honest user honest". I mean maybe there are people that use Photoshop to create false id's, does this mean they'll have to restrict the scan of official documents? Anyway, maybe they're doing this over some advantages, or were obligated to act this way.
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