corrupt © symbol in Photoshop File info

[davidgordon]

I'm trying to get to the bottom of a problem I (and a few others) first blamed on iView MediaPro.

Using iView to synchronise metadata back to a TIFF results in the copyright symbol © becoming slightly corrupted when viewed in Photoshop's File info. © becomes ¬©

I actually though Photo Mechanic wasn’t doing this, but maybe it does... On the Adobe Photoshop Mac forums people say when a file is annotated outside Photoshop or Bridge the problem show up and maybe its to do with Photoshop reading the wrong IPTC data.

This would appear to be similar to this question http://forums.camerabits.com/index.php?topic=740.0 in this forum. I’ve checked and my PM preferences are as advised.

However, on ingesting some RAW files and adding captions I see in the XMP file

Code: [Select]

   <rdf:Alt>
    <rdf:li xml:lang='x-default'>Copyright ¬© David Gordon 2006</rdf:li>
   </rdf:Alt>

Now that really can’t be right, can it? PM can’t be writing ¬© where it should be ©.

My heads starting to hurt over this. I’m not quite sure where the fault lies, who can offer advice?

Thanks

--
David Gordon

[Kirk Baker]

David,

I'm trying to get to the bottom of a problem I (and a few others) first blamed on iView MediaPro.

Using iView to synchronise metadata back to a TIFF results in the copyright symbol © becoming slightly corrupted when viewed in Photoshop's File info. © becomes ¬©

I actually though Photo Mechanic wasn’t doing this, but maybe it does... On the Adobe Photoshop Mac forums people say when a file is annotated outside Photoshop or Bridge the problem show up and maybe its to do with Photoshop reading the wrong IPTC data.

This would appear to be similar to this question http://forums.camerabits.com/index.php?topic=740.0 in this forum. I’ve checked and my PM preferences are as advised.

However, on ingesting some RAW files and adding captions I see in the XMP file

Code: [Select]

   <rdf:Alt>
    <rdf:li xml:lang='x-default'>Copyright ¬© David Gordon 2006</rdf:li>
   </rdf:Alt>

Now that really can’t be right, can it? PM can’t be writing ¬© where it should be ©.

My heads starting to hurt over this. I’m not quite sure where the fault lies, who can offer advice?

XMP uses UTF-8 encoding.  The Copyright symbol is encoded as two characters: 0xC2 and 0xA9.  When decoded it turns back into the Copyright symbol.  The software that is showing your text field with that extraneous character is not decoding the UTF-8 data stream correctly (or more likely not at all.)

The character sequence you provided above is correct UTF-8 data for the Copyright symbol.  Photo Mechanic is indeed putting those two characters there because it writes out legal UTF-8 character sequences as required by the XMP spec (actually the XML spec).  We use Adobe's own XMP library to read and write XMP data in Photo Mechanic.

In the case of iView's synchronization of metadata back to the TIFF file, it may be that they are writing out a UTF-8 encoded IPTC record which is completely legal, but I do know for a fact that Photoshop ignores the encoding of IPTC records and just uses the system's text encoding, thus it would show the two characters instead of one.

Let me know if you need further explanation.

-Kirk

[davidgordon]

Thanks Kirk, that explains more than I've had from anyone else over the past months trying to solve this.

I've just learned that this is a "known issue" with Photoshop and won't be fixed any time soon.

Thanks again

--
David Gordon

[Kirk Baker]

David,

Thanks Kirk, that explains more than I've had from anyone else over the past months trying to solve this.

I've just learned that this is a "known issue" with Photoshop and won't be fixed any time soon.

I know that Adobe is leaning strongly towards XMP, but if they could just change their IPTC code to handle UTF-8 encoded IPTC records, a lot of this problem would be solved.  I know they can do it since they already deal with UTF-8 data in the XMP files that they process.

Maybe they could address the issue in Photoshop CS3.

-Kirk