Does anyone know how to unedit a blacked out face in a child porn pic? I have a case where I believe a suspect took photos of a child and blacked out the face. I need to identify this girl. Any suggestions would be appreciated. I don't have any information on the software or methods used to black out the face.
I am no expert, but I do not think it possible.
Generally, when pictures are being worked on, the program saves the list of edits, but once the file is saved and/or the program exits, the edits are erased. This is analogous to Office having it's own list of undo's; you could not take a random word document and start undoing the last authors actions.
The caveat in this would be the file format. If the file format is one that saves the layers, rather than compressing them down into one layer, then you might be able to. I do not think .png or .jpg can do this.
Hope this helps, and hopefully someone more knowledgeable will chime in to confirm or refute what I am saying.
What's the image format?
If it's just blacked out, you're most likely out of luck. It's possible to reverse Photoshop filters, as in the case with
Oh, I nearly forgot. Have you contacted or forwarded the image to
Don't forget to check the header of the image for an embedded thumbnail, also check the thumbs.db files present on the system and the 'vista thumbnail cache' its possible the computer would have generated a thumb before the file was edited. Check them all as it could have been in any folder before wink
Don't forget to check the header of the image for an embedded thumbnail, also check the thumbs.db files present on the system and the 'vista thumbnail cache' its possible the computer would have generated a thumb before the file was edited. Check them all as it could have been in any folder before wink
Excellent advice.
Oh and I forgot to mention, conduct a signature analysis on the volume shadow copies (If present) these can be a gold mine of info