Mitigating Artifacts of JPG Compression in Digital Images

Over on Forensic Magazine, Foray's David “Ski” Witzke attempts to tackle the subject of crappy JPEG images. After reading his very long treatise on using older versions of Photoshop to try and reduce the many problems you'd run into with JPEG images, I'm so glad for my copy of FIVE.

The Deblocking filter works great in reducing the appearance of JPEG blocks. Using FIVE means that I don't have to go through a tortured series of steps as described in Ski's article, with the accompanying mess trying to explain the steps to a jury.

Remember, with FIVE, you get the plain English explanation, the details, the parameters, and the academic reference from which the process/filter is derived all in your report. With FIVE, your report is built in the background as you go.

No offense to Ski. His company sells Photoshop plug-ins (among other things), so he's going to be bound to what Adobe gives him to work with. But, reading Ski's article reminded me how happy I am that I've switched from Photoshop to FIVE for my forensic science work.