Thomas Robinson was experimenting with a way to recover censored text from documents that use the Photoshop “mosaic” filter to redact text. One way to brute force a solution to a redacted message is to run the mosaic filter with a number of input letters, looking for visual matches that progressively uncover the censored text.
Manually performing this trial and error approach would take quite a bit of time, but Thomas was able to automate this by writing a Javascript program that interfaces directly with Photoshop CS3 and performs the necessary filters and test operations to uncover the secret message. This is cool on a number of levels, not only for the particulars of the example, but also for the fact that you can now script Photoshop in plain old Javascript.
There are so many cool things you could do with an easy scripting interface to Photoshop. Check the video above to see this particular application in action, or follow the links below for the full discussion and example code for writing the Javascript code to make something like this work.
Recovering Censored Text Using Photoshop and JavaScript
Photoshop Redaction Recovery Sample Code
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