Photoshop challenge?

[Stargazer]

I was hoping that someone more familiar with photoshop would be able to shed light on something I found while I was following a thread about a scammer on a Mercedes forum.

The original thread (http://forums.mbworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=244457) is over 10 pages long and still unfolding, so I'll summarize:

Background: A guy sells (non-existing) wheels to multiple people for thousands of dollars each and keeps trying to stall about lost shipments until payment clears.

The Action: Members of the forum get fed up and start searching for the scammer's location. Despite the use of proxies, the scammer is identified as being in Boston, MA. His myspace, ebay, paypal accounts are found along with possible place of work and residence. Photos of his car are used to identify the license plate. Authorities are notified and they are monitoring the situation.

This all happened over the weekend, and although it appears now that a refund has been issued, it has not cleared yet and we don't know to what extent authorities will get involved.

Now, with that out of the way :), my question is about how someone was able to take a picture of a blocked out license plate and reveal the letters and numbers underneath.

I know that it is possible to reverse a photo effect like swirl to get the original picture. Police were able to do it to catch a pedophile (http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2007/10/16/pedophile-cdn.html) last year.

But at least with the swirl, the picture data is still there. How can you do that with a white box? Hasn't the data been removed?

Look at this post (http://forums.mbworld.org/forums/showpost.php?p=2841828&postcount=326) and this one (http://forums.mbworld.org/forums/showpost.php?p=2841858&postcount=331) and this one (http://forums.mbworld.org/forums/showpost.php?p=2841888&postcount=335). They show examples of how someone was able to reveal blocked license plates.

Can anyone explain how this is done?

This forensic stuff intrigues me and I'm just trying to get a better understanding of it :).

[dslrchat]

This will be a challenge!
I have saved one of the pics from that thread, no luck as of yet, and no tuts on google that I have found.
Very interesting and I will do some more digging/trying.

[Corbin Lane]

I have tried but I reallly don't think that it's possible to do that. Not on a flat layer image because if you tried to one thing to the plate then you would do it to the whole car.

The images that I have are only jpg so that's a flat layer and nothing can be done with that but he might have save the picture of his cars in a different format that they might be able to de-layer.

So basically the image that we have might not be the image that they used to get the plate numbers.

[swanseamale47]

In the image where the flash has overlit the reflective plate it might be possible with a raw image to bring back some detail with the exposure or recovery sliders (on the original image). However when the plates blanked out theres no way of seeing it unless it's covered up on a seperate layer, once the pixles are removed they cant be brought back. My guess is it's faked.
The swirling effect can be reversed to a certain extent by using the algorthym used and reversing it, some trial and errors is involved to get the correct amount of reverse but as said the pixles are still there just moved, once deleted they simple are not there to rearange. Wayne