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Question

Painting out sensitive information in scanned PDFs with photoshop

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
January 27, 2019
4 replies
1512 views

I have come across some scans I made of some important papers in PDF format. They were done in color, but are mostly black and white forms that were filled in with handwriting. However, they have sensitive info on them like social security numbers. I am to upload these into the cloud, but was worried about the SSS numbers, so I opened the PDFs in Photoshop, used a paintbrush tool, and "painted" out the numbers on the form with a white color from the color swatches, so now it looks like that part of the form was never filled out. I then saved the PDF as a .tiff file. Then I would convert the .tiff back to PDF.

My question is, is this enough to make the documents safer in the cloud? could a hacker get in, and somehow find the numbers I painted out in photoshop? I used white in 100% hardness to be opaque.

I could go back to the original paper documents, use a black marker, or white out pen, (whichever would be better)? and blot out the info, and then scan the document again as another PDF. But to me it seemed labor intensive, since I have a ton of these papers to go through, scan, and then shred the paper. I thought if I already have a scan of them, why not blot out the info in Photoshop?

Which would be better? marker, then rescan? or "paint" out the info in photoshop if I already have a scan of a document?

This topic has been closed for replies.

jane-e

Community Expert

Here is the new thread on the Acrobat forums:

Removing sensitive info from scanned PDFs and using a marker, vs acrobat post scan for info

Barb Binder

Community Expert

There are some lassies (edit: lasses?) on the Acrobat forum, Trevor, and we would concur with using the redaction tool in Acrobat for this job.

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

M

missartistAuthor

Known Participant

Thank you, yes, I did use OCR on them, and how would I use this Redact tool? I am using Adobe Acrobat X Pro that I got with CS6.

gener7

Community Expert

Rick’s Acrobat X Redaction Guide would be specific to your edition of Acrobat.

Contain through information with screenshots and is part of the Acrolaw blog that Adobe sponsors for legal professionals.

Gene

T

Test Screen Name

Legend

You are right to be careful. Serious exposures have been made of sensitive material. The best approach is to use Acrobat Pro which has a “redaction” tool.

D

DaveJCummings

Community Expert

Some great insight in regards to this. My Acrobat skills aren't as advanced as they are with Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, but this comes in handy as there's some things I would need this for.

davescm

Community Expert

It depends.
If you added the white brushing on a separate layer and saved the TIFF with layers and then made the PDF retaining the layers (Using "Preserve Photoshop Editing Capabilities") then yes you can get back to the underlying material.

If you worked on one layer - or flattened the image to a single layer for saving the TIFF or did not check "Preserve..." when making the PDF then you now have a single layer file and cannot look underneath the white brushing.

Dave

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

A good answer Dave. If only everyone gave their answers some context. A couple of things come to mind.

1) We are often asked to retrieve 'redacted' information from image files, and I can't remember a single time when when we were successful. Full black is full black, and there is no information to work with.

2) The lads in the Acrobat forum would almost certainly have some valid thoughts on this. It is their app after all.

Conrad_C

Community Expert

Additional context that might be useful to think about. Do the original PDF files have additional metadata, such as searchable OCR results, annotations, etc. that needs to be preserved for legal or other reasons? If so, the PDF > TIFF > PDF processing may wipe it out, and again it would be better to use the Acrobat Redact tool.

Another reason to consider the Redact tool in Acrobat is that it saves the extra two steps of converting every single document to TIFF and then back to PDF.

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