Twenty-Twenty Vision

This year Adobe Photoshop is celebrating its 20th anniversary. At the same time the company is generating hoopla about the launch of its Creative Suite 5, which adds tools like "puppet warp," demonstrated above, to the Photoshop software package. Of course, more cynical users will point out that what seems to be an amazing addition of the tools of 3-D animation to everyday image alteration has long been part of other products in the suite, such as After Effects.

Roll-Over Beethoven

Rollovers and sliders that show women both with and without makeup represent a special case for online interactivity. Whether it is Sarah Palin or a model in the New York Times, computer users can virtually undress them.

Photoshop Haiku

Selleck

Waterfall

Sandwich

Need I say more?

Poster Children

In "Rendering Fear: The Graphic Design of Al Qaeda," Cliff Kuang argues that jihadist organizations have embraced many aspects of the Photoshop aesthetic and Americanized, corporatized, and transnational conglomerated media compositions.

Al Qaeda and the myriad groups that seek to emulate it are evil, without question. But they also happen to be modernizing their public face, at break-neck speed, translating their message to the Web and to magazines. What they're running into--in addition to annoyances with Photoshop and Pagemaker--are stereotypically Western middle-management questions of marketing and tone. And you can see that tension in the design of their materials.

Thanks to Jenny Cool for the link!

A Vanished Civilization

Reader Michael Thomas points out that this item about "The World Tomorrow If the Internet Disappeared" has become a piece of Internet ephemera that is widely distributed via e-mail and other informal channels.

Much of the humor in the user-generated content in this Photoshop contest depends on knowledge of print artifacts and the oddity of Internet cultural practices when transposed to the page or to the architectures of physical rather than virtual marketplaces.

There is even a James Joyce joke for the literati!

Why Can't I Do This?

The use policy on the White House Flickr photo stream makes a series of demands in the legalese posted next to the images.

This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

In this case, I've added some relatively lame Photoshop editorializing that is certainly not my best critical work. But by manipulating the photograph to insert a wounded Iraqi child into the White House Halloween holiday scene, I'm clearly violating the terms that are specified next to the image. But this alteration also makes a political statement and should thereby be protected speech on first amendment grounds.

I also have questions about the rules that limit use to news publication and personal printing by the subjects in the image. If a mother of one of these children prints out the image, is that a violation of the terms of use? What about a pro-Christian anti-Halloween activist who might want to show the image to others at a political gathering that should again seem to be under free speech protection.

Mix and Match

Sketch2Photo promises to automate the work of selecting and compositing images from different sources in order to create seamless montages with the right composition and visual rhetoric without the multi-step alterations of an image editing program like Photoshop.

Truth in Labeling

As I get ready to guest teach a unit on counterfactual photography at UC Irvine with my longtime friend and colleague Jenny Cool, I am looking to update my talk.

Today's piece in the New York Times from "The Ethicist" Randy Cohen, who once commented on YouTube cheating videos in a segment of Good Morning America in which I was originally scheduled, specifically asks the question if photos "should come with warning labels" if they have been altered with the image software program Photoshop. Cohen opens with the example of a recent Ralph Lauren advertising campaign, a company that was also involved in an intellectual property dispute with the mega-blog Boing Boing after bloggers mocked a particularly distorted model. It's interesting that the examples originated with the blog Photoshop Disasters, which primarily criticizes amateurish execution rather than the ideologies behind the more finished work that the fashion industry specializes in.

Cohen notes that a number of countries are considering legislation that would require a disclaimer on artificially skinny images, so that young people with eating disorders won't have their warped view of the world and quest for impossible body types legitimized. Cohen admits that such warnings may be ineffective and they would almost necessarily become too long, if they tried to take in all the mitigating factors for a model on a fashion shoot, but he does think that the basic idea has merit, even if it might give more evidence for Cohen's critics who accuse him of social engineering. Cohen explains his position as follows:

Yet it’s still worth posting those alerts. That’s one way ideas percolate through a society. Social change is achieved by battling on many fronts: studying gender roles, learning about health and nutrition and calling attention to bogus photos. That is how we can move toward a less creepy concept of female beauty than the one promulgated by Ralph Lauren and, more ambitiously, resist the sexist assumption that beauty is a commodity women are obliged to provide to men. This is not to deny the delights of allure, of playfulness, of flirtation, of sexual attractiveness: bring them on. But don’t make it all the woman’s burden only, don’t make it contingent on what she buys and don’t lie to get her to buy it.

Meanwhile, the beauty industry is seeming to alter its editorial policies based on enthusiastic online comments and viral distribution of nude images that defy norms like this and this.

A Meme of a Meme of a Meme

Just when you thought that the Internet couldn't get any better, there comes Animals With Lightsabers, a website that encourages contributors to post images that combine Star Wars geekitude with high-traffic animal cuteness. Rather than offer a web generator that does all the work for them, visitors to the site can download lightsaber image assets to add to animal photographs by manipulating digital content in programs like Adobe's Photoshop. A hummingbird with a lightsaber? Done! Bear cubs dualing with lightsabers? No problem!

Laugh Lines

The copy on "Photoshopped images: the good, the bad and the ugly" from the Los Angeles Times isn't particularly insightful when it comes to the ethics and aesthetics of image manipulation, but it does quote my Popular Culture Association colleague and Facebook friend Montana Miller:

"I think the perfect bodies we're seeing in magazines that are Photoshopped have a terrible effect on how women feel about their own bodies," says Montana Miller, assistant professor in the department of popular culture at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

Little Photoshop of Horrors

The blog Photoshop Disasters recognizes this recent cover of O magazine as an exemplary case of particularly bad digital imaging. Oprah has had trouble with magazine covers and image alteration before: a 1989 cover of Reader's Digest attached her head to a model's body, as the "The Golden Touch" explains in an issue of Digital Arts. Photoshop enthusiasts have also created YouTube videos in which the popular talk-show host is made more conventionally thin and feminine.

(Thanks to Nedra Weinreich for the link!)

Practice Makes Perfect

As someone who took a distance learning course in Photoshop this summer in which the instructor seemed to make all the instructional videos in his basement, I thought this skewering of online software instruction was quite amusing.

General Beauty Queen

In "General Touch Up," BAGNewsNotes analyzes doctored photographs from the US military using the "before" and "after" images of a female commander that were published by the BBC, along with an editorial note about non-inclusion of such altered pictures from the Associated Press.

Beyond the fact that the Army doctored a photo of Ann Dunwoody, America's first female four-star general, I'm curious about how the National Press Photographers Association, along with other media, chose to describe the doctoring itself.

Comparing the grainy original to the redo, NPPA singles out just two aspects. One is the removal of the background and the insertion of old glory. The other is the removal of the stars on Dunwoody's uniform. Naming only these elements, however, gives the sense NPPA purposely avoided the main point, which is the tuning up of Dunwoody herself, including her hair color and complexion.

Worst Foot Forward

The Washington Post reports that the image above was shot by a Reuters reporter and was not created by Photoshop, although it has many of the compositional qualities that would be associated with the rhetoric of a digitally doctored photo made for humorous effect.

It's also worth noting that the Post just endorsed Obama, although a tally of the total newspaper endorsements and the readerships associated with those papers shows three interesting things: 1) there are many editorial boards who have yet to announce a pick in major media markets, 2) Obama is leading by a margin of over two-to-one in both the number of papers and the readerships associated with them, and 3) the numbers of newspaper readers for whom their masthead has taken a side is still relatively small by other media standards. In fact, there are many YouTube videos that have reached much larger audiences than this sum of subscribers reached by print journalism.

Swimsuit Issue

In response to the famed Photoshopped bikini photograph of Sarah Palin, Nell Scovell has designed some similar Biden shots for Vanity Fair. In this case I don't think that there will be as much debate about the authenticity of the three photos in the spread, especially for the one in which Biden appears in a red, white, and blue women's bikini.

Poolside Fauxtos

Already my e-mail inbox is stocked with "a picture is worth a thousand words" messages with photo attachments involving Alaska governor and vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. Of course, as "Fauxtography & Gov. Sarah Palin" illustrates, this is a cleverly done photo composite. For more on the computer technology that can be used to spot even the most artful composites, see this Nova profile of computer scientist Hany Farid, which is worth watching despite the testosterone styling of this faculty member by the show's producers.

Update: For more on the pool fauxtos and other Internet Palin-related memes, see Virtualpolitik pal Billy Kimball's "Sarah Palin is Rubber; Barack Obama is Glue."

Now You See It . . . Now You Don't . . . Now You Do Again

A recent Public Radio International story about the destruction and rebuilding of Ferhadija mosque in Banja Luka, a Serbian stronghold in Bosnia that was known for its de facto ethnic cleansing when civil rights protections for Muslim inhabitants were withheld, featured the importance of certain kinds of software applications.

In "Rebuilding a Bosnian mosque" reporters describe how after the mosque was obliterated from the urban landscape of the city by Serbian wrecking crews with orders to disperse and hide the pieces, images of the old mosque in historical photographs were also "airbrushed out." Although it is not clear that Photoshop was used to alter the photographs in this official exhibition, one political critic has created a Photoshopped composition that shows the mosque rebuilt where the twin towers in New York were destroyed.

Digital technologies have also played a role in rebuilding the mosque as recovered fragments of the stone are cataloged in a database and then virtually positioned in a software program, much like a 3-D jigsaw puzzle. See the website for the project here.

A Caption is Worth a Thousand Words

The New York Times has published a number of interesting items about Photoshop this month

In "Photography as a Weapon," documentary filmmaker Errol Morris speaks with image manipulation researchers and bloggers who public editorial images and includes interviews with Hany Farid and Charles Johnson. He follows the lineage of current "fauxtography" back to Germany's John Heartfield and the photomontage work that he produced during the Weimar and Nazi years. Morris actually argues that the problem has more to do with public perception than it does with digital manipulation.

But doctored photographs are the least of our worries. If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.

The Times also ran a piece called "I Was There. Just Ask Photoshop" that examines how the software program is altering the record of family history for many individuals who are excising divorced spouses or including absent relatives in snapshots in the family album or on the mantelpiece.

Although the initial tone of the piece seems to chide this behavior, the reporter also includes the opinion of at least one cultural historian who suggests that this is less of an aberration than it might seem.

The impulse to record family history that is more wishful than accurate is as old as photography itself. In the 19th century, people routinely posed with personal items, like purses or scarves, that belonged to absent or dead relatives to include them, emotionally, in the frame, said Mary Warner Marien, an art history professor at Syracuse University and the author of “Photography: A Cultural History.”

In India, she said, it is a tradition to cut-and-paste head shots of absent family members into wedding photographs as a gesture of respect and inclusion. “Everyone understands that it’s not a trick,” she said. “That’s the nature of the photograph. It’s a Western sense of reality that what is in front of the lens has to be true.”

Thanks to my HCC colleague Peter Moore for the Morris story.

Plane Truths and Plastic Ken Dolls

"Plane Truths" is the first of the webisodes about Senator John Edwards shot by Rielle Hunter, who has now been linked to the former Democratic presidential candidate in an extramarital affair that seems to have derailed his political future, given the public popularity of his wife.

The intimacy of the pseudo-confessional style of these online videos in which Edwards talks about how Hunter's team is "filming all the time" is certainly not without irony. The website of Midline Groove, which once produced the videos, is currently dead, but their credit screen shows a crudely Photoshopped face of Edwards grafted onto a Ken doll.

Other webisodes in the rhetorically fascinated series that is often set to loud country music include "The Golden Rule," "Plight of Uganda," and "Plugs." The last of these indicates the candidate's concern with the blogosphere, traffic to his website, and the viewership of the Daily Show.

Where's the Website for Chinese People Making Fun of English Speakers?

As the Beijing Olympics draw near, a number of e-mail messages are circulating with images from Engrish.com. Although conventionally the genre focuses on "humorous English mistakes that appear in Japanese advertising and product design," this site also has a section for errors committed to writing by Chinese speakers.

What I find interesting about the website is their insistence on authenticity and their claims that they only manipulate images digitally to lower resolution and add their domain name watermark.

The Engrish contained in the pages of Engrish.com are real and true examples of flawed English. Engrish.com has not touched any of the photos in any way (to enhance their humor or otherwise), except to lower their resolution and to add "www.engrish.com". The webmaster personally took many of the photos found on the site and can assure you that they are genuine.

If there has been any such editing, it was done by those that forwarded Engrish.com their samples. Engrish.com scrutinizes all photos as much as possible before posting them, but we cannot rule out the possibility (however slight) that they are not genuine. If anyone can prove that a photo that Engrish.com has received from others is not real then it will be immediately removed from the site (or put into a special “fake Engrish” section).

The photo below ("Fuk Mi") is an example of tampering and was sent to Engrish.com many times. The original name of the restaurant is actually Fu Kim. Although it goes without saying, this picture will never make “Engrish of the Week”.

Although I will admit to chuckling over the sign in the Korean taxicab I once read that advised passengers to contact the authorities "in the event of uncomfortable intercourse with the driver," as a teacher of English and a learner of foreign languages I have nothing but admiration for people who try to overcome their default monolingualism.

I also found this "English to Engrish" generator, which transformed the opening paragraph in this very blog entry into the following sample of scrambled prose.

"When the Beijing Olympics pull soon, simultaneously, several E-mail messages are circulating the image from Engrish.com. Usually genre &The focus is adjusted to quot, but; Humorous English appears in Japanese and the product design which it has announced mistake and " There is a section for the being wrong which endeavors in writing and with the Chinese speaker in this place."