I’m excited to announce that the company founded by my old boss & friend Kevin Connor, working together with image authenticity pioneer Dr. Hany Farid, has released their first product, FourMatch—an extension for Photoshop CS5/CS6 that “instantly distinguishes unmodified digital camera files from those that may have been edited.” From the press release:
FourMatch… appears as a floating panel that automatically and instantly provides an assessment of any open JPEG image. A green light in the panel indicates that the file matches a verified original signature in FourMatch software’s extensive and growing database of more than 70,000 signatures. If a match is not found, the panel displays any relevant information that can aid the investigator in further assessing the photo’s reliability.
Check it out in action, and see also coverage in the NY Times:
One other neat detail:
Fourandsix will donate 2 percent of their proceeds from the sale of this software to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). The donation will support NCMEC efforts to find missing children and prevent the abduction and sexual exploitation of children.
VERY impressive.
Would love to have purchased it but a little too costly for checking the occasional image. But as a working business tool it looks brilliant.
Useful software, I just wish it would be released as SaaS making this cool technology available on the Cloud, on pay-as-you-go basis.
[I think the problem is that many law-enforcement customers are prohibited from connecting their machines to the Internet. –J.]
John, This post is off topic, but I got so excited with I saw this on my Face book page, a quick video tutorial by Bryan Hughes. a.k.a. “the dark Porsche hit-man” for Adobe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTEWlp6OTGE
I was floored what Photoshop can now do with PS6 with video.
I was in Babourville, KY, last week, located in the bowels of Eastern KY. I came upon college downhill bicycle races. Being the dummy, I had no gear with me, so I pulled out my Iphone4s and shot movies and stills.
After watching the video I slapped those clips into PS, and wow, added the color effects I did not know were in PS………certainly no hollywood film maker, but in 30 mins I had a 9 min beauty of work…..when I get it loaded up on Vimeo, I will let you know.
John, I think this short clip by the “hitman” is one of the best for the video in PS…..I know in KY a lot of us photogs do not have all are “biscuits cooked” , but gee whiz, I mean its a killer help to a guy like me.
Kind regards,
Ken in KY
But if you print the image and then take its picture (picture of a corrected picture), will it detect the 2nd generation?
William, you’re correct that a re-photographed image would still pass the FourMatch test. This product simply confirms whether the content came direct from a camera; it doesn’t make any judgment about the reality of what the camera was photographing. That said, it can be fairly tricky to take a photograph of a photograph without leaving any indications that this wasn’t a real, three-dimensional scene, and we’ve already had some discussions about potential ways to add detection for this in the future.