How to find hidden text in an image

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imartynjones
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How to find hidden text in an image

Post by imartynjones »

Help (Please)

I need help in finding some hidden text in the following image:

http://www.eclectic-penguin.org.uk/cach ... ection.gif

The image contains some coordinates for a GeoCache. I have tried using various paint packages, but no joy. Any ideas on what i should be trying?

This is from the Cache Owner:
A clue - since its been nearly a month. No special cryptographic/steganography tools were used in concealing the coordinates. I used plain Paintshop Pro 7.4, the same basic graphics tool I have used for other caches that have had coordinates hidden in images. Several have said to me that they've spotted anomalies in the image when analysing something else, and doing a slight modification. The coordinates may well be in the anomaly. There are also a number of clues in the image itself as to where to look, once you've found the obvious mis-directions...

Martyn
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glennrp
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Location: Maryland 39.26.30N 76.16.01W

Re: How to find hidden text in an image

Post by glennrp »

There seems to be nothing hidden in the file. I tried looking at the image with increased and
decreased gamma, and dumped the image file with "od -c". It could just be some kind of puzzle
involving the numbers in the matrix, e.g., N 47deg 18min 53.07sec, N 13deg 08min 53.18sec
in Austria. I would start by looking at the descriptions of some other caches from the same owner.
rich2005
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Re: How to find hidden text in an image

Post by rich2005 »

I found some text but it might be a complete "red herring" or maroon as the case may be.

Since it is a gif file, it has a colour map, 2 of the colours are duplicated, maroon, hex 800000, (apart from some strange black entries)

editing either to another colour reveals some text but...

....it says, "no hidden message here try again" screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/b6d04v4.jpg

I can not see any other exact duplicates in the colour map, plenty of close colours or maybe completely the wrong track to find the co-ordinates.
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