Photoshop & fingerprints & forensics, oh my.

I was clicking around online yesterday, procrastin…er, doing some market research, when I came upon this interesting website, forensicphotoshop.blogspot.com.

I’ve read frequently on Adobe’s website that the medical slash science industry is a huge demographic of their Photoshop and Acrobat sales. (From the Adobe site, here’s an interesting white paper on the subject of Adobe and Foresnics.) At trade shows and socially, I have run into people who use Photoshop for cool stuff like the Genome project. But I’d never noticed a website devoted to a segment of the graphics industry that isn’t considered a creative market.

Until now. The author, Jim Hoerricks, rounds up a lot of Photoshop topics that are interesting in their own right, and moreso because they are referencing, to me, an emerging boutique part of the industry.

From ‘Forensic Nursing and Photoshop‘: “It seems that the mix between proper care / documentation of cases and the need to protect against liability has lead many nurses to pack a small point and shoot camera as part of their kit. They are using these cameras to document wounds, bruises, bite marks, odd rashes, and so forth as part of the patient’s file. Patients, especially children, are often in so much pain that keeping them still becomes a problem and the nurses just have to point and shoot and hope for the best. More and more of them are turning to Photoshop to help fix the photos.”

From ‘Let me count the ways …‘, about the Measurement tool: “Many in the forensic realm have heard of Photogrammetry, but have shied away from trying it for fear of that dreaded word … math. Never heard of Photogrammetry? In a general sense, its a method used to determine the geometric properties (ie. height, width, distance, etc) of an object in an image. It is far more complicated than the simplistic definition that I’ve offered, but I think that you get the point. I bring this up as a way to introduce the new Measurement feature in Photoshop CS3 Extended.”

Through his post ‘Prosecuting Graffiti Taggers using Color Deconvolution‘, Jim Hoerricks links to an interesting site called 4N6site.com that has free plugins for use in Photoshop Forensics. Cool stuff, and that’s from a plugin developer!

This fingerprint rose was sooo much fun to make!


regards -Debbie

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