C2PA – Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity – came to the Z 6III with the 2.0 Firmware update. This is cutting edge, brand new stuff (Beta) and with it being new, questions pop up. The first is, “I installed the firmware update but can’t find C2PA in the menus!” That’s is correct, it’s not there until you finish up installing it via the Nikon Imaging Cloud website. In short, your Z 6III (only Nikon currently capable of C2PA) talks to the Nikon Cloud where the certificate is created that then resides in the Z 6III. Before going further and giving you the impression I fully understand this new technology, I do not. But I have done a deep dive in the past 24hrs and want to share what I’ve learned. The most important things are, this is Beta and, this will be important in the years to come.
What does this all do for you? The short story is, it creates a document that another party can access (if attached to the image) with all, and I mean all, that has been done to a particular image since the shutter went click. Nikon created a page (you need to be signed in to view) with a short rundown into C2PA. If you have the latest version of Ps, in the Window drop-down menu you will see Content Credentials (Beta) which I have just started to explore. What’s the purpose of all of this? In the short form, it’s to assure the viewer that what they are seeing is what was photographed and not created by AI. In the long form, the implications are far-reaching. For now, I just wanted to explain why you don’t automatically see the option in your menu and provide a little insight into where this technology might be going. It is cool and a hat tip to Nikon for spearheading this effort as C2PA comes to the Z 6III.
