Ah, dear readers. We meet once again on the dance floor where I promptly apologize for my lack of updates and then attempt to engage you with my wild flailing. You might hear me mutter something about a vacation to see family or making a concerted effort to find employment, but we both know that the internet cares not for these. They want updates and they want them issuing forth like water from a spigot with the valve snapped off. I may not get back to my regular schedule for a little while but hopefully more frequently than the past week or two.
A few posts ago, I talked about Photoshop and how it can be used to correct and improve photos. Today’s post flips the coin and we see Photoshop as a tool for less serious endeavors or perhaps more serious manipulations.
As long as there have been photos, people have been fiddling with them. Ansel Adams did a lot of refinement to his raw images while he was in the darkroom. There is the famous case of the cut-n-paste photo used against Lee Harvey Oswald. These are obviously pre-digital manipulations. This type of thing has been going on a long time.
Once Photoshop hit the scene, the time consuming, delicate and somewhat messy process of manually editing photos became much more approachable. No funny smelling chemicals. You didn’t even have to work under a red light! The program was expensive and not incredibly intuitive to use, limiting it to more serious and business-related endeavors. Next up, the speed of the average joe’s internet connection begins to increase. Netscape is released. The web becomes a visual place. Pirated copies of Photoshop are used to create a growing tide of silly images. More people understand the language of Photoshop. Design students begin learning the program in classes (and are able to legally purchase student versions with Mom and Dad’s money). Free programs like Gimp are released. Somewhere along this path there is an explosion of digital fakery for serious and silly purposes. This article on Posterwire provides a nice collection of example links.
I am not above these type of shenanigans myself.
If you have the perfect idea for a hilarious pants-wetting photo of your own but don’t want to do the dirty work yourself, feel free to contact me for a quote (See that handy Contact link in the top right-hand corner of the page?). R and X-rated concepts need not apply. Please do not send any images with your initial request.
Jason Patz 