Posted on 04/27/2011 10:13:46 AM PDT by RED SOUTH
I AM NOT A BIRTHER! But this one is too interesting to ignore. Upon hearing all the fuss about the newly released Certificate of Live Birth, I decided to open it up in Adobe Illustrator and see just what we were given by the White House. Judge for yourself but looks to be composed by multiple elements.
No. Not an OCR. If it was you'd be able to select individual text characters.
I think the theory is it was over sharpened which could produce that white halo around the black text.
No problem.
If you open any image in an editing program , then use a sharpening filter on it. you will get a contrasting halo around some areas. This gets especially pronounced with graphics containing lots of text.
There’s things odd about the document, the halo just isn’t one of this big ones.
When the MRC compression algorithm seperates the text from the background image, you can still see the text in white there. Then, the background image is compressed using an ordinary image compression algorithm similar to JPEG. If you use JPEG to compress any image with textual content, you get this kind of halo as a compression artefact. You can often see this (try it out!) when people make screenshots and then save them as jpg instead of png: The JPEG compression artifacts are often so strong that you can barely read the text on the screenshot anymore.
>I looked at the certificate. I thought both parents had to be born in America. Says Obama’s father was born in Kenya. Am I missing something here?<
No your not missing anything .. but it was exactly what the MSM has been pushing forever. that he was born in Hawaii.... to most of us that was never the issue. But they called us birthers. Now that he can “prove” that he was born in Hawaii, they will say .. that we are claiming something different.
The law is the law .. and it is right here
http://rs6.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=001/llsl001.db&recNum=227
born of a brit .. Obama’s not legit
I keep being distracted by the degree of “precision” in the gradient reproduction where edge of the original curves. I'm having trouble imagining how that edge could have been printed with toner or ink onto a hard copy with the security background and then scanned back into a digital format while managing to preserve such a remarkably smooth gradation, as if there is a level of transparency applied to it that gradually reveals less and less of the green background behind it.
Now I can produce effects very similar to that kind of apparent graduated transparency with digital illustration tools. What I can't imagine doing is printing it in such a way that it still looks like that. In printing there is either a halftone screen or dot or rosette pattern that in my experience prevents such precise variations in grayscale from being preserved on the hard copy.
Admittedly there is an X factor in that I cannot begin to guess how compression filters might handle a scan of a fine-resolution halftone screen, but it would rather surprise me if when compression is performed on a speckled background, it would wind up looking so remarkably smooth especially when so many other attributes of this have seemingly suffered a loss of clarity through compression. Yes, I know that, generally speaking, image compression can have the effect of replacing speckles with flat areas of color/shade. However I don't think I've seen such an clean illusion of transparency and such an absence of banding occur as a result of compression. Have any of you?
We all know this was a scan from an original source that didn't have a security background, but what I'm suggesting is that perhaps the original source was applied digitally to a digital image of the security background?
If so, that is an odd way to handle this, although it certainly doesn't mean that this is a forgery, nor does it cast doubt on the content of the original inset document. It just seems strange that the original would have been digitally composited with the security background instead of printed onto it, but that gradient/transparency begs me to think that may be exactly what was done.
I am no expert, but I have been around digital imaging and printing for a long time and in multiple capacities, and occasionally I'm even capable of paying attention to fine details. So, I feel almost qualified to at least ask the real experts this question. :-)
Apologies if all of this has already been kicked around elsewhere. There's just so much to read today.
Could this really be a scan of a document printed onto the green security background? I feel a bit of doubt on that.Hmmm, I have been wondering about that green background myself. Yes, it looks a bit strange. I think it looks a little less strange if you look at the seperate background layer, with the text objects removed. Perhaps it’s just an optical illusion, I am not sure. It is hard to tell since there are several different factors that may influence the appearance; the first scan, the apparent print-out, the second scan, and the compression. Anyway, you seem to have much more experience with scanning than I have, so your opinion there is probably worth more than mine :-).
I do it daily. Work is processing graphics and photos (then color separating) for printing.
In this article:
there is a quote:
“On April 25, 2011, pursuant to President Obama’s request, Director Fuddy personally witnessed the copying of the original Certificate of Live Birth and attested to the authenticity of the two copies. Dr. Alvin Onaka, the State Registrar, certified the copies.
President Obama authorized Ms. Corley to pick up the documents. On April 25, 2011, Ms. Corley appeared in person at the Hawai’i State Department of Health building in Honolulu, paid the requisite fee, and was given the two certified copies, a response letter from Director Fuddy to President Obama, and a receipt for payment.”
and a statement:
“Director Fuddy made an exception for President Obama by issuing copies of the original birth certificate. The departmental policy to issue only computer-generated Certifications of Live Birth remains in effect for all birth records that have been computerized. Director Fuddy, in her capacity as Health Director, has the legal authority to approve the process by which copies of birth records are made.”
“The exception made in this case to provide President Obama with a copy of his original Certificate of Live Birth, was done according to the letter of the law,” Attorney General David Louie said.
Maybe I’m reading it wrong, but it looks to me like Director Fuddy made photocopies of the original document, which were picked up by a Ms. Corley for Obama.
If these were hard-copy photocopies, then any OCRing, layers, etc., would have been done once the photocopies arrived at the White House.
With Obama’s track record for falsifying documents I believe it is highly likely that this is a fake birth certificate. With certain original data removed.
It begs the question then, that there must be something on the original BC that Obama does not want released. Otherwise, why wait 2 1/2 years to release this faked “birth certificate?” Obviously, they want the issue to be put to rest, to further ridicule and marginalize “birthers,” and to draw attention away from the real birth certificate.
Yes, I've been meaning to bring this up.
Here's how I'd, quickly, get the look of the file:
Scan the doc, convert to B/W if necessary. Remove white and/or convert to a grayscale image with high contrast. Print or place this on the green security background.
It's a placed scan or a printed scan onto the bkgrnd - the green bkgnd replacing the non-black areas of the scan.
This, IMHO, is revealed because the bkgrnd matches/flows on the edges, no mismatch.
Make sense, see above. There's a scan placed or printed onto a background. They could do this to make further manipulation more difficult.
They also could be referring to getting an electronic file to the WH very quickly - all done digitally. The date on this is April 26.
"I said to my team, look, even though this is not usually what the state of Hawaii does. Even though the Republican governor of Hawaii, the Democratic governors of Hawaii, all the various officials had confirmed that I was born here, let's ask them for a special dispensation where they will go ahead and provide us with the original to see if we can put this to rest,"
What constitutes "special dispensation" in this case, I do not know.
My point was if the Hawaii DOH had cobbled together a digital copy, placing gifs of time/date/certification stamps and emailed it over to the White House it could explain some of the oddities.
Here’s what I don’t get:
From the page curl, this is obviously supposed to be a scan/pic from a book page. This document is obviously not the raw scan, it’s been put on top of security pattern.
What we see in the BC PDF is black with white around it on the seamless security pattern.
When the scan was done, the book page was the background: regular book paper or whatever color or pattern. The background of the original scan has been removed.
Laser and inkjet printers don’t print white ink - you get white by not printing anything on white paper. (Or sending to a press and using white ink, not likely here.)
So, what I believe had to happen here is the scan background was removed (cleared) in a photo editing program. All that remained were black pixels and the surrounding white pixels.
The result was placed on a digital green security background - again, in a computer. This digital file was then made a PDF and delivered as the file we see.
None of this means that the scan was altered. It just means going to a lot of trouble instead of just releasing the raw scan.
The only good answer I can think of is to do this to make it harder to tamper with or alter.
Hope this makes sense.
Except I was just informed by a Kool Aid drinker that you have to submit your BC to get married, especially in those days.
Where is the record for MuBarak Obama and MO?
Before I shut up and go to bed, I want to be as complete as possible.
It is not necessarily so that someone went to a lot of trouble to do this. It could be that all BCs are scanned and background removed. This could even be automated. Maybe HI does it this way.
However, they say they don’t supply them, this was a special case making it less likely they’d scan and post process all of them as a matter of procedure.
thanks for your posts..
Yes, and after the background of the original scan was digitally removed. IMHO, there's no printing involved in the PDF we have. Not until you print out that file.
We are on the same page. The same things sparked my curiosity.
Considering the version the AP released, it’s almost as if the White House want the “fake” wheels to keep spinning.
In my limited inquiry I haven't yet seen that exact background-overlap condition, but your position that it wasn't first printed onto blank security stock and then scanned is definitely what I was thinking.
This adds a bit of oddity given that according the words of the officially released correspondence, we are given the impression that this was issued in hard copy by the HDOH. At least many people are likely to infer that, since a person was sent to "pick up" the certificate.
The registrar, the doctor and the parent are all put on there at birth. The ONLY thing that would be different from year to year is the signature of the one who signed and stamped the certificate certifying that it is a certified copy requested in that particular year. A registrar in 2001 can not certify ANYTHING about a birth even 10 years ago - only on the date of the child.
In 1966, the Director of Health and the Registrar General can certify that the copy of a 1961 COLB they are sending out is an authentic copy. Just as the State Registrar in 2011 can certify that the copy of a 1961 COLB he is sending out is an authentic copy.
The two signatures at the bottom of the Nordyke image only certify that the COLB above was an authentic copy of the original form. The Onaka signature at the bottom of the Obama image only certifies that the COLB above it is an authentic copy of the original form.
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