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HTPBE?

Structural PDF tamper detection API. Catches edits your KYC stack misses.

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© 2024–2026 TMI Iurii Rogulia · VAT ID: FI29845875 · Made in Finland 🇫🇮

Status

Algorithm v2.44.3

Tool profile

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop reads as a downstream re-saver — it surfaces disproportionately on documents whose original Creator was a different, often institutional, application.

Back to all statistics
Forensic verdict

Anomaly profile

Based on this tool’s share of the HTPBE? corpus.

Modification rate
78%+29pp above baseline
Corpus baseline: 49%
Corpus share
0.28%
Share of all analyzed appearances
Modification rate
78%
+29pp above baseline
Role split
60%C/40%P
Creator vs Producer share of appearances

Corpus profile

How Adobe Photoshop shows up in HTPBE? corpus

Adobe Photoshop’s PDF export is raster-first and rebuilds the document around an embedded image stack. Legitimate for photo books, posters, and rasterized artwork.

Photoshop-as-Producer on a document whose Creator was a text-based institutional source is structurally inconsistent (raster-rebuild of a text document) — that producer/creator mismatch, especially with vectors-flattened-to-image evidence, is a contextual signal.

The signal
Photoshop-as-Producer on a document whose Creator was a text-based institutional source is structurally inconsistent (raster-rebuild of a text document) — that producer/creator mismatch, especially with vectors-flattened-to-image evidence, is a contextual signal.

Role in the workflow

How Adobe Photoshop shows up in metadata

Every PDF carries a Creator (the application that produced the original document) and a Producer (the engine that wrote the PDF). The same tool can appear in either slot, with very different modification profiles.

CAs Creator · 60%
As Producer · 40%P
CAs Creator
  • Share of appearances
    60%
  • Modification rate
    73%
  • Avg file size
    986 KB
PAs Producer
  • Share of appearances
    40%
  • Modification rate
    85%
  • Avg file size
    2.1 MB

How to read this

The Creator slot typically reflects where a document started life. The Producer slot reflects whatever wrote the bytes — and is the field that gets overwritten when a PDF is opened, edited, and saved by a downstream tool.

A higher modification rate as Producer than as Creator usually means the tool is acting as a re-saver on documents that originated elsewhere. A higher rate as Creator points to fragile workflows around the original authoring app.

Name fingerprints

Also goes by

Different version strings and spellings observed for Adobe Photoshop in the wild. All are merged into the same canonical profile.

Adobe Photoshop for Windows -- Image Conversion Plug-in33.8%
Adobe Photoshop CS5 Windows8.8%
PDF Presentation Adobe Photoshop8.8%
Adobe Photoshop 23.4 (Macintosh)7.4%
Adobe Photoshop CC 2018 (Windows)5.9%
Adobe Photoshop 26.7 (Windows)4.4%
Adobe Photoshop 2025 Windows4.4%
Adobe Photoshop CS4 Macintosh4.4%
Adobe Photoshop 7.04.4%
Adobe Photoshop for Windows4.4%
Adobe Photoshop CC 2017 (Windows)2.9%
Adobe Photoshop CC 2019 (Windows)2.9%
Adobe Photoshop 21.0 (Windows)2.9%
Adobe Photoshop CS6 (Macintosh)1.5%
Adobe Photoshop 24.0 (Windows)1.5%
Adobe Photoshop for Windows -- Image Conversion Plug-in; modified using iTextSharp™ 5.5.13.3 ©2000-2022 iText Group NV (AGPL-version)1.5%

Why variants matter

The same tool publishes itself under 16 different metadata strings — version bumps, locale tags, build IDs. We canonicalize them so the corpus reflects one identity, not noise.

Most common
Adobe Photoshop for Windows -- Image Conversion Plug-in
33.8% of appearances
Variant spread
16 distinct strings
Long-tail share: 66.2%
Observed range
19.11.2018 → 15.07.2026

Distributions

What ships alongside Adobe Photoshop

The PDF versions Adobe Photoshop writes when acting as Producer, and the other tools that appear in the same documents.

PDF versions written

Most output is PDF 1.4 (71% of files where Adobe Photoshop is the Producer).

PDF 1.470.6%
PDF 1.317.6%
PDF 1.65.9%
PDF 1.75.9%

Common Producers when Adobe Photoshop is the Creator

iText writes 34% of these files — that pairing is the Adobe-stack default for many institutional pipelines.

iText34.1%
PDF Generator7.3%
iLovePDF4.9%
pdf-lib4.9%
StreamServe2.4%

Common Creators when Adobe Photoshop is the Producer

Adobe Photoshop sits upstream in 74% of cases — read this row as “what kinds of documents end up routed through Adobe Photoshop.”

Adobe Photoshop73.9%
Adobe InDesign13.0%
Chrome (Print to PDF)4.3%
Scan Assistant4.3%
wkhtmltopdf4.3%

Related profiles

Tools you’ll see next to Adobe Photoshop

Other tools that frequently share metadata with Adobe Photoshop in the same documents. Each card links to its own forensic profile.

P21% co-occurrence
iText
Corpus share7.8%
Mod rate47%
P4% co-occurrence
PDF Generator
Corpus share0.01%
Mod rate100%
P3% co-occurrence
iLovePDF
Corpus share2.8%
Mod rate90%
P3% co-occurrence
pdf-lib
Corpus share0.48%
Mod rate90%
P1% co-occurrence
StreamServe
Corpus share0.03%
Mod rate67%

Long tail

Notable observations

Smaller cuts of the Adobe Photoshop corpus — useful context, but treat each row as a single data point rather than a strong signal.

Embedded JavaScript
3%

Of files contain JavaScript code

Avg pages per document
3.2
Oldest observed
19.11.2018 — almost 8 years ago

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