Content Authenticity Initiative

Hi folks - I was running an update to PS today and looked at the release notes. They indicated that Adobe's CAI Helper was being updated, and I had no idea what that was, so I Googled it. Turns out that, since April 2022, Photoshop has a beta implementation of built-in Content Authenticity tools. Here is Adobe educational material about the topic:

https://edex.adobe.com …ticity-initiative/preview

and here is the CAI (Content Authenticity Initiative) website explaining what CAI is and how and why it is being developed:

https://contentauthent​icity.org

Part of the CAI web presence is the "Verify" website, which permits uploading of an image to inspect its embedded CAI content:

https://verify.content​authenticity.org/inspe​ct

Anyway, I had not heard of any of this but I thought I would post here about it, as it might be a useful tool for photographers and digital artists who want to preserve the provenance and verify the authenticity of their work.

To implement this in PS:

1) You have to be running the latest version of PS.
2) In the Preferences, navigate to "History and Content Credientials" and enable "Content Credentials (Beta)"
3) When you perform edits to an image (for example, open a raw file in ACR, convert it, bring it into PS, make some adjustments, resize) PS will register these edits.
4) You can preview the CAI information that PS will embed in the exported file using the Window > Content Credentials panel.
5) To save the file and embed the CAI data, you must EXPORT the file and choose to embed the CAI data in the Export dialog. Save As... will not embed anything.

6) You can upload the resulting file to https://verify.content​authenticity.org/inspe​ct to inspect the results.

7) If you open the CAI-embedded file and do further edits and export the newly edited file, it will add another entry into the provenance of the embedded CAI data. This way there is a breadcrumb trail of editing history and each stage of the asset(s) that were utilized in the edits.

Interesting technology.

I tried an experiment where I converted a raw file into PS, did some edits, exported with CAI data to JPEG. Then I opened that JPEG, did a second round of edits and exported again with CAI data. The attached screenshot of the verify page depicts this generational edit provenance on the left of the screen.

Then I opened that JPEG in PS and did another edit and simply performed a Save As... and saved a JPEG copy. When I tried to upload that to the verify website it threw an error and told me "something went wrong." I was trying to test if the previously embedded CAI data would persist through a Save As operation where there is no option to embed CAI data. Who knows. It's beta.

Kirk