Quote:'...But that’s not so, says Jean-Claude Tremblay, a leading software trainer and Adobe-certified expert,SOURCE:
who has years of experience working with and teaching Adobe Illustrator.
“You should not be so suspicious about this,” Tremblay told FoxNews.com, dismissing the allegations.
He said the layers cited by doubters are evidence of the use of common, off-the-shelf scanning software
-not evidence of a forgery. “I have seen a lot of illustrator documents that come from photos and contain
those kind of clippings -and it looks exactly like this,” he said.
Tremblay explained that the scanner optical character recognition (OCR) software attempts to translate
characters or words in a photograph into text. He said the layers cited by the doubters shows that software
at work –and nothing more.
“When you open it in Illustrator it looks like layers, but it doesn’t look like someone built it from scratch.
If someone made a fake it wouldn’t look like this,” he said.“Some scanning software is trying to separate
the background and the text and splitting element into layers and parts of layers.”
Tremblay also said that during the scanning process, instances where the software was unable to separate
text fully from background led to the creation of a separate layer within the document.
This could be places where a signature runs over the line of background, or typed characters touch the
internal border of the document.
“I know that you can scan a document from a scanner most of the time it will appear as one piece,
but that doesn’t mean that there’s no software that’s doing this kind of stuff,” he said, adding that it’s
really quite common.
“I’d be more afraid it’d be fake if it was one in piece. It would be harder to check if it’s a good one if it’s
a fake,” Tremblay said...'
To some, below may seem boring and not relevant, but it's important when understanding why Mr. Tremblay
is incorrect only because he's using the 'layer' reason as a point to prove that the document is genuine.
It's not bona fide in the manner that at some point during the journey of the Obama document, it was printed
out from either a scanner/printer or loaded onto a computer and then printed out via a printer.
It's not original of course, but the produced image was a physical thing more than once.
I worked with Adobe Photoshop -in all it's different versions, for over fourteen years and used scanners that
ranged from a few dollars up to a few thousand. My main scanner was the size of a car and worth a million
dollars at the time.
With every scanner and software, I have never found a scanned image with layers. An image is scanned for
one reason only, to obtain the image for archiving, use or maniplulation to use later.
Whether the image is used in the newspaper/magazine industry or official registration with legality reasons,
the image is desired to be one unit so no tampering can occur without obvious evidence.
It's a non-physical 'photograph' -if you will. Even a legal text document is still just a 'non-real' image.
A colour-scanner usually scans in three modes. RGB (red, green, blue), Grayscale (shades of black) and
lineart (a single black line that's commonly used for basic drawings or techincal illustrations).
A scanner scans whatever it has been given. If the object remains stationary and flat on the glass scanning
plate, there's no blurring unless the object is already blurred, moved at the time of scanning or positioned
poorly (a non-flat object).
If a particular software does have the automated ability to pluck out parts of a document and separate them
from the main object, the same software wouldn't produce 'halos' or white background behind the part it
deems 'separate'. That effect could only be produced by printing a copy of a scanned image and printing
it poorly.
The Obama document is supposedly a blank legal document produced for the use of birth registration
in Hawaii. This particular certificate became Barack Obama's birth certificate in 1961 and the text was
produced on a typewriter. It comprises of black ink pressed onto a green and white herringbone design.
But assuming this is correct, it has one thing that makes it different from anything seen on the internet.
It's a real object. This doesn't mean the document is genuine, it just means it exists in our reality.
To explain the white 'halo' background around the text on Obama's birth certificate, the reason is that the
colour of background -the official green 'herringbone' decoration -done to make fakery difficult (just look
at the complexity on a currency note), hasn't been added to the colour of the black text.
That might sound odd, 'black text' having colour added. But in reality, it's not black!
The black colour on a computer is just the accumulation of the extreme areas in the gamut of the three colours
Red, Green and Blue. A gamut is the total shades of colours available in imagery software.
Just like the idea of a grayscale or monochrome image. It might look grey to the viewer, but it's just thousands
of shades of black used to colour' the image. If a colour image is converted to greyscale, then the software
changes the shades of colour to comparable shades of black.
When using a computer, we've become accustomed to seeing the the colour of something as real colour and
usually, it doesn't matter. It doesn't, unless you're going to bring that image out into the physical world and that's
when care needs to be taken.
Desktop printers use Red, Green and Blue inks (usually) and unless the green is added to an item of text,
there's always a chance that a poor-quality printer could -although I doubt it with modern-day printers, could
produce a copy where a shift takes place and the lack of ink (the white) is seen where the black should be.
The easiest way to explain this in commercial printing, is to start with what is commonly used commercially.
The colours used are 'Cyan (blue), Magenta (red), Yellow and Key' (black). CMYK.
If a background colour (let's say it's green) is added to anything that is above that background -like text, if there's
a shift of the printing plates or poor alignment of the registration lines (the crosshairs sometimes seen on the side
of a newspaper), the blue and yellow printing plates that make the colour green -the background, will still do their
task and so a white background would not be allowed to be seen.
The white 'flecks' of the herringbone design that are in that background would not be relevent and so, the colour
white would not be needed to be added due to the material it's printed on is white.
But the 'Long Form Document' of Obama seems to have been scanned from the official birth registration book
and loaded onto a computer. Then printed off from the computer -via an old or RGB-cartridge, misaligned printer.
This 'damaged' version was then used for display as the long form document.
But this isn't the trail of evidence given!
................................
What I'm saying is:
The original cannot have had the white behind the typewriter ink because of the official green/white herringbone
design. It's a lack of green colour being added to the black text before printing.
So it was scanned, has been printed out and then re-scanned.
So where did the white halo glow around the text letters come from?
The original was poorly scanned and the scanner failed to capture a precise, sharp image of the birth registrary
page. This caused the a lack of crisp difference between the herringbone effect and the black text.
Even data compression wouldn't cause this as the certificate isn't a complex image and even if lossless algorithms
were in play, the halo effect couldn't be debated as information-saving due to the importance of one colour stopping
and another starting at the text edges.
And it isn't 'print-bleed'! Remember this document is supposed to be a scan of the original.
It also implies that there wasn't really a concern for accuracy to produce the evidence of a President's birth place!
Some of the letters are identical and I'd doubt that a single typewriter key could strike the inked-ribbon twice
and produce a duplicate print on the even surface of a sheet of a paper. But even if remotely possible, it becomes
more absurd when taken into consideration that:
When a scanner is used (capturing reflected light).
An information-saving software (of which there are many) to hold the copy of the scanned image is used.
The accuracy of a copy-of-a-copy holding-area on the internet and the effects to the information being made available
for download.
...And it's supposed to be accepted that a single letter can be still be exactly the same as the original?!
Don't use the excuse of scanner/computer software having the ability to seperate text from it's background, Mr. Tremblay.
If this was true, parts of the document's lines that comprise the boxes would be a layer or two also.
It's a botch-job from start to finish.
Edith Head Gives Good Wardrobe.