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Friday, April 29, 2011

Obama's Long Form Birth Certificate Layers Explained

     I work in a sign shop. We use Illustrator CS5. Our graphic designer Freddy, he lives and breathes Illustrator. I told him about the PDF file of the long form birth certificate and when you open it in Illustrator it's in layers. I also told him how people are saying that this is proof that it's a fake. It's doctored they say. Well, it is. Sort of. Freddy took a look at it today, out of curiosity of course. Freddy is a non-political kinda guy. Here is Freddy's explanation:
      What they did was scan the document in color first, to get the background. He noticed that the top and bottom of the background were added pieces. Probably to make the form longer, the original length which didn't fit in the scanner? So then, Freddy says, they re-scanned it in black and white. If you remove the top layer (the text) you will see a white shadow of the text (exactly matching the top layer) in the background pattern which means that they removed the text from the first (color) scan. Most likely because the text was to faint or gray to be clear. They re-scanned in black and white, removed the background and darkened up the text then placed the new, darkened text over the color background. It seems that they also fixed some smudges, cleaned it up a bit too. Freddy says he does this sort of thing all the time, it is standard graphic artist procedure. I don't think it's fake.
     So, in a nutshell they simply scanned it twice so they can darken and/or clean up the text, yet still retain the color background. BUT, the only thing we can't understand is why didn't they flatten the image when they were finished? Obviously, whoever did this knew what they were doing. So why? My theory is that they left it layered on purpose to keep the birthers talking. Birthers are perfect targets for Obama and the Democrats during this campaign year!

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