June 7, 2008

If you alter a photograph with MS Paint, and then save it, can you later 'undo' the changes? (more)?


Let's say you take a picture of a person, and to protect their identity, you must use the painting tool to "paint" a banner on them. Then you save it then. You do not have a backup copy of the original.

You send the photo on the web. Someone records on their hard drive. Can they use any type of software to "remove" blindfolded? No.

4 comments:

backup guy said...

(From old blog's comments)
in any kind of programme image editing, once you've made a change directly to the image and saved, you lose the original image. What you did was alter the pixels themselves. So say you had a white circle. In the middle of this circle is a beautiful flower. Now, you paint a black band across this flower. It is now a white circle with a black band in the middle. You save the image. If you open the image and you remove the black band, there is nothing in this framework. You've changed all the pixels that make up the image of the flower in black, they are no longer there, they are black.

The only situation where this is possible (but unlikely for reasons I'll get to one minute) is much more complex image editor such as Photoshop. Photoshop uses layers that you can think of as paper, which can be made transparent. So you can take this image, and on a separate layer, above the image itself, a strip of paint. What you are then two layers, one is the image where you can see the face of the person, the second coming of the strip. With the two layers visible, you can see a person blindfolded. But you can turn layers and outside, so you can turn off the blindfold layer and the person see his face. If you had to copy the Photoshop file, and someone downloaded in Photoshop, they can disable or even remove the banner layer. But there is little or no places that you can download a native Photoshop file with its layers preserved. Instead, you have won a "plateau" jpeg, which would have only one image layer, and therefore you see the person blindfolded. And you have the same situation as your MS Paint: removing the blindfold just be the elimination of pixels and leave nothing behind; face pixels no longer exist.

I hope it gives you a better idea of how it works! No.

backup guy said...

(From old blog's comments)
The original is lost forever.

backup guy said...

(From old blog's comments)
"Delete" No, but they can change the same way you did, "paint" on the strip.

backup guy said...

(From old blog's comments)
not once you change it, thats. But you can
choisir''enregistrer''apr�s you change the peak and it will save the amended one as a different name and you have the original.