Social Chameleon

Photoshop Disasters has quickly become my new favorite blog. In newspapers, digitally manipulating an image can amount to a blacklist-able offense; in advertising, however, it’s par for the course. We all know that beauty magazines airbrush the hell out of their subjects, but when it’s done right, the changes are imperceptible. Images can only be taken to a certain degree before they start tumbling into the uncanny valley. What Photoshop Disasters does is compiles some of the laziest, most egregious uses of image manipulation ever to be unleashed on the general public.

This is what bugs me when people ask if I “know” Photoshop. Yes I do… technically. I know what all the tools are, what they do and how to switch between them, how to select certain parts of a picture and stack things using layers. Does that mean I know what do do with those tools? Partially. I have a laundry list of parlor tricks I can perform with reasonable accuracy (so long as you’re not looking for anything sharper than 180 dpi reproduced on newsprint). Am I any good at it? Not really. But I’m learning.

At least I know not to play fast and loose with perspective and bizarre limb-lengthening.