BASIC FORENSIC IMAGE PROCESSING

Instructor: Natalie Kirk, MFA, MA
Course length: 24 hours

The use of Photoshop, for forensics, is to enhance the visibility and to emphasize and/or isolate existing information within the image. The use of Photoshop by untrained individuals can render an image inadmissible in court. The Basic Forensic Image Processing course will be of interest to forensic photographers and others engaged in the enhancement of forensic images who have limited experience using Photoshop or are unfamiliar with the use of Photoshop.

Emphasis in the Basic Forensic Image Processing course is placed on the enhancement of images intended for comparative sciences, such as fingerprints and footwear, tire tracks, or tool-mark impressions. Students will be introduced to digital darkroom techniques that can be employed to images to enhance their visibility without adding artifacts or new information.

Course Learning Objectives

File Types
What is Compression?

Lossy vs Lossless

- Should I shoot in RAW?
- Pros and cons of each file type

Bridge
More than a File Explorer

Viewing and Organization

              - Importing from the camera
              - Labels
              - Filters
              - Detail Comparison

Catalogs and Renaming

- Batch rename
- Catalogs

Other

- Contact Sheet
- Automated tasks

Adobe Camera Raw
Primary adjustments

Batch corrections

- Apply minor adjustments to several images at once, ex. White Balance correction.

Opening Photoshop
Familiarize with the user interface

Setting up the Workspace

- Navigation, Tools, panels, palettes, preferences, etc.

Preferences

- Scratch disks and history log

Panels

- How to show/hide and dock

Tools

- What they do
- Where they are

Image Calibration

Resolution

- Resizing for digital or print format viewing

Cropping and Canvas Size

- Straightening
- Perspective correction

Layers and Adjustments
What are Layers? What is destructive editing?

Layer types

- Adjustment Layers
      - Duplicate layers
              - Grouping
              - Labeling

Filters

              - Sharpen
              - Blur
              - Lens Correction

Masking

- Non-destructive editing
- Isolating edits to affect chosen areas of an image

Channels and Color Modes
How does color affect an image?

Color Modes

   - RGB
   - CMYK
   - LAB
               - Grayscale

Channel Separation

- Channel Mixer
- Black and White
- Isolating color-based information

Overlay Techniques and Blending

Panoramas
Focus Stacking

- Composite multiple exposure images

Actions

Turn multi-step edits into a button

- How to create a set of actions
- Pros and cons

Preparing Figures

Case notes and presentations
- Text
- Shapes
- Arrows and Lines
- Enlargements

Class Requirements

Materials Needed:

Participants are required to bring a laptop computer with a working copy of Adobe Photoshop CC or Adobe Photoshop CS6 and Adobe Bridge. The trial version is acceptable. Please do not download and install the trial version more than two weeks before the course to ensure that the software functions properly throughout the class.

Materials Suggested:

Connectable mouse

Natalie Kirk, MFA, MA

Holding two master’s degrees in photography from the University of Wisconsin Madison, Natalie Kirk specializes in biomedical photography and its application in pre-clinical and clinical research; including procedure documentation, wound analysis, and microstructure visualization.

Not only has she been an instructor of digital photography with the University of Utah since 2017, Natalie has served on a panel for the Utah State Board of Education to evaluate and rewrite the qualifying exam for instructors.

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