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HTPBE?

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

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Status

Algorithm v2.23.1

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 45 appearances across the HTPBE? corpus.

Modification rate
71%+23pp above baseline
Corpus baseline: 48%
Total appearances
45
0.22% of corpus
Modification rate
71%
+23pp above baseline
Role split
62%C/38%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 · 62%
As Producer · 38%P
CAs Creator
  • Usage
    28
  • Modification rate
    64%
  • Avg file size
    943 KB
PAs Producer
  • Usage
    17
  • Modification rate
    82%
  • Avg file size
    2.3 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-in31.1%
Adobe Photoshop CS5 Windows11.1%
Adobe Photoshop CS4 Macintosh6.7%
Adobe Photoshop 26.7 (Windows)6.7%
Adobe Photoshop 2025 Windows6.7%
Adobe Photoshop 23.4 (Macintosh)6.7%
Adobe Photoshop 7.06.7%
Adobe Photoshop for Windows6.7%
Adobe Photoshop CC 2017 (Windows)4.4%
Adobe Photoshop 21.0 (Windows)4.4%
Adobe Photoshop CC 2019 (Windows)4.4%
Adobe Photoshop CC 2018 (Windows)2.2%
PDF Presentation Adobe Photoshop2.2%

Why variants matter

The same tool publishes itself under 13 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
31.1% of appearances
Variant spread
13 distinct strings
Long-tail share: 68.9%
Observed range
19 Nov 2018 → 9 May 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 (57% of files where Adobe Photoshop is the Producer).

PDF 1.457.1%
PDF 1.342.9%

Common Producers when Adobe Photoshop is the Creator

iText writes 46% of these files — that pairing is the Adobe-stack default for many institutional pipelines.

iText46.4%
PDF Generator10.7%
iLovePDF7.1%

Common Creators when Adobe Photoshop is the Producer

Adobe Photoshop sits upstream in 67% of cases — read this row as “what kinds of documents end up routed through Adobe Photoshop.”

Adobe Photoshop66.7%
Adobe InDesign20.0%
Scan Assistant6.7%
Chrome (Print to PDF)6.7%

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.

P29% co-occurrence
iText
Appearances1,715
Mod rate46%
P7% co-occurrence
PDF Generator
Appearances3
Mod rate100%
P4% co-occurrence
iLovePDF
Appearances584
Mod rate88%
C7% co-occurrence
Adobe InDesign
Appearances11
Mod rate64%
C2% co-occurrence
Scan Assistant
Appearances1
Mod rate100%

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.

Pages parsed
152
Oldest observed
19 Nov 2018 — over 7 years ago

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