Photoshop Phoolishness

Photoshop is a pretty impressive program. It can work technological magic, seamlessly enhancing and altering photos with a few clicks of the mouse. Often judicious edits can be undertaken leaving little to no evidence behind that they were in any way altered in the first place.

Usually.

When wielded by an untrained (or trained but overzealous) hand, the effects can be more disturbing than wonderful. You probably have seen them before, on magazines, cheap DVD covers and mail circular catalogs.  Despite their ubiquity, I still think it is a great idea to seek them out. I personally have the blog Photoshop Disasters in my RSS feed, as I think anyone who works frequently in visual media needs to be reminded, frequently, of what not to do. It also opens up an interesting view in the sociological and psychological subtext of images. Watching a photo editor overshoot can give us a good idea of what the cultural (at least from a selling standpoint) ideal is, as opposed to the 'boring' reality that was originally captured on the camera.

The debacles range from amusing to outright disturbing as limbs are chopped off, cleavage ballooned to insane proportions and the subjects are clumsily dropped into backgrounds with mismatched lighting. The liquefy tool is either the best or worst thing to happen to photo editors, as it seems to be the culprit abused in the majority of 'photochops.'

Via Photoshop Disasters

Models are a very popular target. One of the most famous photochops of recent memory is the Ralph Lauren ad featuring a model looking more skeletal than alluring. Both Photoshop Disasters and The Huffington Post published articles blasting the photo (if you can call it that any longer) and the wholly unrealistic image it was trying to sell (so unrealistic even a size zero model can't achieve it. You may think that it would be impossible to go any farther from reality than that.

Via Huffington Post

As always, we are proven wrong. A rash of Internet citizens decried a case of a full body swap between Demi Moore on the cover of W and Anja Rubik. Although never fully substantiated, it is not the only case. Kimora Simmons was reported to have used a body double in her ad for Baby Phat. Does this say something about our idea of beauty when perfectly good-looking people don't pass muster on the pages of glossy magazines?

Via Jezebel

Whether it has an important sociological component or not, I believe everyone can agree that these 'disasters' are something that the media profession needs to work hard to avoid. How can we do that? Simple. I think the mantra that we need to use when working with any visual media (be it a photo manipulation or a personal website.) should be:

less is more.

The bobble-head model is the photographer's version of the blink text tag. Just because you have the technology to remove an actor's hands and replace them with someone else's (or, say, make the background of you website a repeating, animated American flag pattern with hot pink text) doesn't mean you have to.