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Photoshop Allows Us To Alter Our Memories
Anti-Globalism writes "In an age of digital manipulation, many people believe that snapshots and family photos need no longer stand as a definitive record of what was, but instead, of what they wish it was. It used to be that photographs provided documentary evidence, and there was something sacrosanct about that, said Chris Johnson, a photography professor at California College of the Arts in the Bay Area. If you wanted to remove an ex from an old snapshot, you had to use a Bic pen or pinking shears. But in the digital age, people treat photos like mash-ups in music, combining various elements to form a more pleasing whole. What were doing, Mr. Johnson said, is fulfilling the wish that all of us have to make reality to our liking. And he is no exception. When he photographed a wedding for his girlfriends family in upstate New York a few years ago, he left a space at the end of a big group shot for one member who was unable to attend. They caught up with him months later, snapped a head shot, and Mr. Johnson used Photoshop to paste him into the wedding photo. Now, he said, everyone knows it is phony, but this faked photograph actually created the assumption people kind of remember him as there."
Now, he said, everyone knows it is phony, but this faked photograph actually created the assumption people kind of remember him as there.
How fascinating I kind of think that this photoshop technique has been around for a long time but I now kind of know more about it thanks to newspaper people over in New York!
What's the point? PS (or the gimp for that matter) only allows more people to alter photographs, anything you do with software can be done, and has been done many times, in a dark room.
I've had enough of theese "film-was-way-better" guys already.
Didn't George Orwell warn us about trying to change our history? I'll keep my photographs as they are, thanks.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
This is from the same school of "reality" as those cosmetics commercials where the model has had 6 hours of makeup and artificial eyelashes in order to look like that.
The more we force life to look perfect, the more we'll be disappointed by what we actually get. There is a great Charlie Brooker skit on aspirational television and how believing that we should be as beautiful and stylish as the cast of Friends and Sex and the City is actually making everybody miserable.
I would also say that the bumps of imperfection are an important part of our humanity. Examples:
- Over produced music sounds rubbish because if we can't hear the strumming it doesn't sound like a human being was playing it.
- If you cook Chilli from a recipe it may come out "perfect every time" but it will also get pretty dull.
- A sunny day is a much greater joy in Scotland, where it's a rarity.
Bah, humbug.
You mean I WASN'T Scarlett Johansson's date to last year's Oscars??? Despite the picture I have of it??
The Soviets altered photographs several decades ago.
Preempting "Americans do it too!"
If this kind of practice becomes common place it wouldn't be long before we start editing people we dislike out of history and ignoring they ever existed. Follow that with a couple decades and people will be erased from media for any number of crimes against the "state".
I just photoshop a better looking woman over all my girlfriend's pictures.
OK, let's try and get organized:
Photoshop vs. GIMP here --->
EMACS vs. Vi there ---->
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I'm just gonna go without any photos altogether thank you very much.
If I can't remember it, it's not worth remembering.
...they did pretty well without PS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_manipulation#History
http://abcnews.go.com/technology/story?id=98195&page=1
I love to cite this study whenever a decision is being made on the 'memory' of, say, a result - rather than an actual record.
There is another study, which I can't promply locate, in which subjects were shown several colors and then a day or two later, when asked to recall which colors they saw, they picked colors brighter and more saturated than those they had been shown.
This, to me, shows why the 'golden age' phenomenon is so prevalent.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's unlikely that you take photographs of every mundane aspect of your life. Some people do it, sure, but those aren't the pictures they want to put into photo albums, flash on their iPods, or hang on their walls. Selective history already plays a role in how we take and keep pictures, so this is just a natural progression of that: keep that photograph, but make it happier.
The Soviet Communists were experts at this. But in Soviet Russia, photos erase you!
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
I have this marathon finish photo - I need someone to change the 3 to a 2 so my memory will be better... :-)
Wow! Thanks CmdrTaco. I'd never heard of this "Photoshop" thing before. Who knew that you could alter photographs?!?
This guy's the limit!
You know all those ancient statues and such and sculptures made or those paintings by artists? Do you honestly think that everyone generally looked as good as the painting/statues? We've always done this. If anything because, I as the king/rich person would lop off some artist/sculpture's head if they didn't make me look good.
Move forward a few centuries and you've got household publishing with the internet/office apps. I wouldn't lop off the wife's or the kids' heads if they didn't make me look good in the family website or photo album, but we'd all pick the shots and photoshop what we can get away with to look our best. (The wife and kids have been taught what we think is decent taste in picking out photos and better pictures from a set so they should know better than posting poor pics.)
It's sort of like the concept of dressing up for photos. No one ever actually wears that sort of crap. It's only used to make you look as what the current culture set thinks presentable for art/photos/pictures is and that's it. (It's all rented or thrown away after that single use because you'd never wear it again.)
.
That sentence kind of creates the assumption of making sense.
in a way, digital photography has taken things away from us.
Photo's used to be precious, they carried a real cost (film, development and printing), and because of that, you used to think about what was worth taking a picture of. Today, a cheap memory card will hold hundreds of photo's, and digital cameras are cheaper than decent quality analog camera's have ever been. It's nearly impossible to find a new cellphone without a (crappy) digital camera in it.
Because a digital photo carries practically no cost, people tend to be less thoughtful about what they take pictures of.
Already, I've found myself frustrated and drowning in thousands of mediocre pictures.
These pictures reside everywhere and nowhere; some are uploaded to various websites, others are emailed, yet others exist only on a hard drive and maybe a backup somewhere. The ease and low cost of copying should mean that shouldn't ever get lost, but in reality, they do get lost, hard drives crash, optical disks go bad, or they are just forgotten in a swamp of old files never to be found again.
There is something about a box full of old, fading photographs that digital photo's just can't offer.
And that's just assuming the photo's haven't been altered. With analog photo's, you could be reasonably sure they weren't faked, because it was fairly difficult and time consuming to fake an analog picture. With the digital ones, it gets easier all the time. What's the point of having a photo of something that didn't happen? You might as well watch a movie, that's not real either.
Ofcourse, I understand why a professional photographer would want to change a picture, for artistic reasons, or to remove something ugly from a picture, like a piece of trash in the background of your best wedding photo.
They promised us moonbases and flying cars, and instead we've got Lolbush's "Mars Tomorrow" scheme and $4.00 a gallon gas. People are living online and in VR, already, because that's the only place you can get a reliable jetpack... and some of the coolest stories on the net are about things like steampunk laptops... so who cares about something as mundane as a reverse-dorian-gray fetish?
I'm a photographer and i had a bride ask me if i could photoshop her father into one of the shots.... only problem.... he died 3 weeks before the wedding. i did it, and it looks good... but it's creepy as hell.
I once believed that history can never be changed. We could make changes in the future, but the past was set in stone. The last person I thought would disagree with this was a history professor. But sure enough, my college history professor explains to the class that history is always changing. Whoever interprets the "records" makes the history.
Ask most 30- and 40-something guys what their high school or college was like and it's almost certain to be different from the reality. We remember what we want. We interpret how we want. The story of the three blind men and the elephant is an old take on this.
Already being done. In fact, there is a commercial (for Dell, I think) where this guy takes a bunch of photos with his girlfriend, then cuts her out of all of the shots, and inserts another girl.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
... in 30 years they'll be passing the photo around asking "Who are these people? When was this taken? Why do I have this?"
Last year one of the grandparents wanted to get all of the grand kids and the pets into a single photo. This is 7 kids under the age of 7, 4 cats and 3 dogs (combined weight of the dogs is around 300lbs, big dogs). They didn't want the adults in the photo just the pets and kids.
Without photoshop that picture wouldn't exist. First of all the cats don't like being held for more than 20 seconds and the kids won't stop falling on the dogs and cuddling them, secondly there is a boy in the mix who appears to be a source of near infinite energy. The video of the photoshoot is hilarious as we try and get them all in one place. In the end after over 300 pictures with around 20 nearly there shots I hit photoshop and created a composite image that looked superb in around 20 minutes.
That doesn't change my memory of the event (people are weird if they start creating a fantasy world) but it does mean there is now a decent picture on the wall. There is a line here between doctoring to create a potential reality and doctoring to create a fantasy. People in the later camp are looking over the wall at the looney bin.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I think it's actually interesting to note that this trend of altering photographs actually has deeper roots.
Think about portrait paintings that were all the rage for many hundreds of years before cameras were invented. The portraits were not usually exact recreations of what the painter saw. Usually, the subject was altered slightly to make them look 'better' (more conforming to the beauty ideals of the time period). The person was usually given clothes, jewelery, and surroundings that were prettier than reality (possibly more extravagant than they could really afford). These portraits were not really meant to capture reality: they were meant as a statement (usually "look how important I am", but perhaps also "this is what's meaningful/important to us").
Old photographs were mostly "staged" (especially really old ones where people had to hold still for them), so it's not like they were faithful reflections of reality, either.
Digitally altered images are similar. People are altering the photos to capture something. Not reality. But rather a statement they want to make, like "look how much fun that day was" or "look how beautiful I am" or "look how much I love you" or whatever.
I'm not going to pass a value judgment on whether this trend is "good" or "bad". Rather I will note a few things:
1. As computer power increases, automated "adjustment" of photos is likely to become more common. (Everything from relatively benign red-eye-removal and HDR tweaking, to more drastic things like automatically making people look prettier.)
2. It may be that only for a thin slice of history were the majority of photos "real"--in the time period where photography was fast and cheap enough to snap "candid shots" but before photo-manipulation was fast and cheap enough to alter them.
3. Despite all this modification, I'm sure plenty of "real" photos will remain--journalists, historians, and even normal folk will still be inclined to archive unmodified pictures. Especially with storage costs dropping, keeping the raw image files (before manipulation) will likely continue. In fact I would hope that future image formats would maintain an internal undo history, where the original photo-data remains.
Holy Cow, Finally my first post...hope I dont lose my password or it could be my last.
Personal "photographic records" have always told a more perfect story.
For one, how many of us photograph our dreary work lives? From looking at my photo album, one would think I do nothing but roam the exotic corners of the Earth. (Which is not the case, I assure you).
Furthermore, I personally toss out the photos in which I'm looking stupid, drooling, spilling my beer on myself or caught ogling cleavage. So the "photographic record" of myself has always been some shiny, respectable version of reality.
We humans love to represent reality with a positive spin. It's what we do. It's the same reason we wear clothes.
Move along. Nothing new here.
It's a lie ! A lie !
Those pictures of me and Salma Hayek REALLY HAPPENED !!!!
*sob*
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I use alcohol to alter (or destroy) my memories.
--I'm not talking about dance lessons. I'm talking about putting a brick through the other guy's windshield.-
Photoshop allows you to digitally take all your exes out of your photos and never have to see them again, unless you run into them on the street. My luck I would too, and have!
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Proper use of the Photoshop trademark
Trademarks help protect corporate and product identity, and Photoshop is one of Adobe's most valuable trademarks. By following the below guidelines, you can help Adobe protect the Photoshop brand name.
The Photoshop trademark must never be used as a common verb or as a noun. The Photoshop trademark should always be capitalized and should never be used in possessive form, or as a slang term. It should be used as an adjective to describe the product, and should never be used in abbreviated form. The following examples illustrate these rules:
Trademarks are not verbs.
CORRECT: The image was enhanced using Adobe® Photoshop® software.
INCORRECT: The image was photoshopped.
Trademarks are not nouns.
CORRECT: The image pokes fun at the Senator.
INCORRECT: The photoshop pokes fun at the Senator.
Always capitalize and use trademarks in their correct form.
CORRECT: The image was enhanced with Adobe® Photoshop® Elements software.
INCORRECT: The image was photoshopped.
INCORRECT: The image was Photoshopped.
INCORRECT: The image was Adobe® Photoshopped.
Trademarks must never be used as slang terms.
CORRECT: Those who use Adobe® Photoshop® software to manipulate images as a hobby see their work as an art form.
INCORRECT: A photoshopper sees his hobby as an art form. INCORRECT: My hobby is photoshopping.
Trademarks must never be used in possessive form.
CORRECT: The new features in Adobe® Photoshop® software are impressive.
INCORRECT: Photoshop's features are impressive.
Trademarks are proper adjectives and should be followed by the generic terms they describe.
CORRECT: The image was manipulated using Adobe® Photoshop® software.
INCORRECT: The image was manipulated using Photoshop.
Trademarks must never be abbreviated.
CORRECT: Take a look at the new features in Adobe® Photoshop® software.
INCORRECT: Take a look at the new features in PS.
The trademark owner should be identified whenever possible.
Adobe and Photoshop are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.
For more information on the proper use of Adobe's trademarks, please refer to the general trademark guidelines.
I'm sure he'll be fascinated by this discovery.
You just got troll'd!
Didn't I see this movie? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338013/
It's a bold move to photoshop yourself into a picture with your girlfriend and her kids on a ski trip with their real father. But then again, Michael is a bold guy. Is bold the right word? --Jim Halpert
Anyone else having problems with slashdot main page not loading. For me the page shows and then goes blank with transferring data from core.insightexpressai.com in the taskbar. This is with Firefox 3.0 on XP
there is an assumption in the story synopsis that photo manipulation is somehow new
read this engrossing blog by errol morris at the nyt, it's an extremely anal retentive take on photo manipulation throughout the ages
his investigation of manipulation of the placement of cannon balls in a photo from the crimean war- yes, the crimean war, that far back, is thoroughly engrossing if you are mentally predisposed to highly detailed anal retentive visual forensics
for everyone else, the shocking historically manipulated propaganda photos are worth the visit
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
People have been doing this since the beginning of photography. In fact people have probably been doing it since the beginning of the concept of the recorded image. I wouldn't be surprised if Uncle Ugg was edited out of cave paintings.
The technology is different sure, but Photoshop has had the ability to do this for years.
THIS IS NOT, IN ANY WAY, NEWS.
Slashdot gets more and more like Digg every day. Please, please stop this trend.
I'm starting to wonder. I was one of the last holdouts for buying a digital camera, and what finally pushed me over the edge was needing to take pictures of products I sell on the Web. I picked a mid-range "point and shoot" and have had trouble with the color fidelity from the outset. The only salvation has been to use Photoshop's "white point" or sometimes "gray point" to alter each shot. All this despite careful color and lighting setups both on the computer (a Mac) and in the actual shots.
This summer, I had the opportunity to spend a few days in Paris--certainly an occasion for taking lots of pictures. The digital went along. To my disgust, every shot I took--indoors and outdoors--had an indigo blue cast, fortunately correctable with Photoshop's color balance.
After a long and tedious process of adding a dash of yellow to each shot, I have come to two conclusions:
1) I need to shell out for a digital SLR. That's a whack of cash and a lot more camera than I need, but I'm tired of messing with this expensive toy.
2) I'm thinking with great nostalgia of my now-unused Minolta film camera. While I won't use it for products, it's likely to ride along on the next trip I take.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
Look up Damnatio Memoriae sometime. They erased people from public records thousands of years ago, for a range of reasons that included:
- betrayal
- so others wouldn't be tempted to do something heinous just to get popularity (e.g., Herostratus)
- being really hated as an Emperor (e.g., Domitian. Though Caligula and Nero came this close to getting one too.)
- someone not liking the role you've played or the model you'd be for others (E.g., Hatshpsut was almost erased from history as a Pharaoh by her son, but he left her name and images alone where she was depicted/named as anything else than a Pharaoh. E.g., Akhenaten got his name defaced off most monuments after death.)
- some reasons ranging all the way to outright silly (E.g., the abovementioned Akhenaten, the pharaoh formerly known as Amenhotep IV, managed to almost erase his father Amenhotep III from history for the sole reason that the name contained the name of the God Amen/Amon/Amun/whatever-you-call-him. And Akhenaten had just gone rabidly monotheistic, even renaming himself the Servant Of Aten.)
Of course, nobody managed to really erase a Roman Emperor from history, because nobody had the resources for such a herculean task. It didn't stop the Senate from at least trying. And IIRC Hatshepsut was pretty much erased until very recently. It took a while to piece together that she's the missing piece in that chronology.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'm glad someone finally wrote an article about how image manipulation can distort people's perceptions of reality.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Two friends who were at the wedding will bicker over the photographs, as to whether JimBob was Photochopped IN or OUT! And the problem is that their memory will not help them.
On the other hand, JimBob will be able to take the blame for 'that one incident' with the Bridesmaid.
Even before Photoshop there was ways of taking pictures that distorted our perceptions of what happened. Even down to the simplest part of Photography when taking a picture you ask everyone to smile... All the people could be in a miserable mood however they don't want to remember that so they all smile for the picture and when they look at in in a few years they will look happy and remember the event as happy. Also for other pictures they just zoom and angle the shot to give the impression they want. I could take a picture of my 6x9 cube. and make it look like I am in a 10x10 office just by getting the picture angled correctly. Or taking a picture slightly out of focus to give the person a slight aura around them to make them look more angelic. Now this being said... Photos have been around only for 150 years or so. So before that they used artiest to record images of what happened and they had even more artistic leway to portray what happened.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Moon Landing 1969. Fakes are nothing new.
Actually this isn't new. Doctors have found that it's fairly easy to manipulate memories with photos and there is the development of drugs used to treat PTSD and other victims to erase or lessen traumatic memories.
What was scary was, a few years back, I saw on TV where they took a classroom of kids, made up a scenario--soon the kids believed that scenario happened to them personally.
I have a big problem with this science. While I understand wanting to help victims that might become suicidal, I have a problem with manipulating someone's memory just as I would shooting them up with mind-numbing drugs so they don't feel anything. I think working through the incident would make you far more stronger than taking a pill to blank it out.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
When did Ric Romero start submitting Slashdot stores?
Well, true, but sometimes it wasn't even just a desire to look good. E.g., in ancient Egypt the paintings and sculptures were
1. invariably religious in nature. A painting or sculpture could actually house the Ka (part of the soul that actually has a shape) of the deceased, in case his mummy gets damaged or he's too poor to get one. (Seriously, a reward you could bestow upon your poorer servants would be to paint them on your tomb walls, or be buried with some little statues of them.)
They didn't even paint and sculpt the person, they painted and sculpted his/her Ka. So the Pharaoh was always painted or sculpted bigger than life and perfectly proportioned, because his Ka was that of a God.The Pharaoh being the living incarnation of Horus. Lower class people were painted smaller than they were. With nobles and officials being the middle ground. This rule took precedence, for example, over perspective. Even if the Pharaoh was in the back and the peasants in the front, the Pharaoh's image would nevertheless be larger than any of them.
2. a matter of sacred rules and traditions, some of them even handed down by the Gods themselves on sacred papirus scrolls.
E.g., everyone would be painted looking to the side, even if otherwise their body is facing the "camera". Always. It doesn't matter if you think you'd look better from the front, your head will be painted from the side anyway. E.g., the tone of the skin was a function of nationality and gender, rather than offering any insight into what they actually looked like. (They were painting the Ka, not the mortal body anyway.) So we have the Egyptian males painted a reddish brown tan, but women are painted with a rather unnatural yellow skin. Other nationalities they knew about were, pretty much, colour coded with their own hues.
And for a bit of final fun, it's worth noting though that some people seem to have been honest with their appearance, though. Akhenaten for example always appears not with the Pharaoh proportions, but as a guy as big as anyone else, pear-shaped, with man-boobs and some thin legs and arms :P
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Some people use Photoshop, but I prefer hopping into my time machine and just traveling back to when the original pic was taken.
I agree with you as regards purely artistic photography. Plenty of the techniques there - fish-eye lenses, long or multiple exposures, colored lenses, etc - already distort reality for artistic purposes.
What I wonder is this: is there a way to take photos as reliable documentary evidence anymore? How can you prove that something has not been altered?
I just added a couple of zeros to my bank statement and I'm rich! Drinks are on me! Really, though, I wish I had the "ability" to fool myself even for a minute by doctored photos, etc. My suspension of disbelief skills are horrible...
That's just my POV... no more, no less.
I saw a pic of a T-Rex using photoshop on a mac. I think it must have been around along time.
This is just another example of how the digital age will make the end of history, true history anyway.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I've worked with old school reproduction work and retouching, as well as photo retouching and digital restoration of antique photos. Analogue manipulations just went digital, that's all there's to it.
Vanity always ruled. Even in real life we try to improve ourselves in order to please the senses: We wear makeup, fake "body" smells, garnments, footwear.. all to make a visual statement. *That's* the naked truth: We all cheat on reality. There's mankind for you.
Scan in an old sepia photo of your great-great-great grandmother, and study it in detail. Very often you'll find lines added: Eyelashes, "eyeliner", sometimes contours of nose and nails were enhanced in the darkroom, engraved modifications right onto the plate. Partly done to improve a poor shot, partly to enhance the subject. Coloring was also done, long before the first experiments with photographic color techniques were launched.
If "photoshopping" is somehow morally questionable, is black-and-white photography also questionable? It certainly doesn't reflect reality. But who ever said reflecting reality is the perogative of photography? All means of portrayal is artificial. Enter: Art.
Even a photo right out of the camera was and is tainted. Parameters are set for sharpness, contrast, hue and colors - be it by choise of analogue film and development etc. - or by digital options - basically mimicking the features of analogue cameras and traditional darkroom processes.
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/digitaltampering/
I wonder if there will be a date, sometime in the future, which is acknowledged as the end of history. Not in the Fukuyama sense, but in the sense that it will be acknowledged as the time whereafter it became impossible to determine the legitimacy or even the date of any document (e.g. because it's all digital).
I know it sounds innocent and all, but how long before that photoshopped wedding picture becomes evidence in a legal case? Considering that people at the wedding claim to remember seeing him there, this could be really problematic in a court of law.
Suppose, for example, that someone affiliated with the relative in question was murdered not far from the reception on the same day. After a few years of dead-end leads, the police finally start to investigate the wedding party, and ask those in the photo about their whereabouts on that fateful day. I imagine the exchange would go something like this:
Officer friendly: And where were you on the wedding day - how did you get to the reception?
Innocent relative: I was out of town that weekend.
Officer friendly: Why don't you just tell us the truth? We know you were at the wedding because your relatives saw you there. We've even got this picture here which proves it.
(later, in court) Prosecutor: And the accused stated that he was out of town, when this photo clearly shows him at the wedding and several guests remember seeing him there.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I remember my dad and I going to a photography club when I was a kid. We marveled at the color prints that a few other members were creating. The equipment to do so was beyond our financial reach.
Now you can produce high quality color photos quickly and cheaply, so many more people get to play.
The lower financial barrier plus the removal of the necessity to make space for all that equipment and chemicals must have at least as much to do with the increase in photo alteration as any skill differences.
Nullius in verba
A quick snapshot today may be more "honest", than an elaborate picture, for which people posed in the earlier era. Yeah, right — the kids were this behaved, or he wore a tie more, or her hair was so well-done.
It would've been harder to edit after the picture is taken, I'll grant you that, but not impossible, as the Communists demonstrated, for example, when famous people started disappearing from the earlier-taken official photos, upon becoming "enemies of the people".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Really? Do they believe that reality itself isn't real, or just that what we perceive isn't the true reality? (I'm honestly asking.)
If it's the former, it doesn't make sense. How can the statement "nothing is true" be true?
If you're going to manufacturer 'memories' why bother starting with an actual photo? Just create CGI figures for everybody involved and stage the entire thing.
TRUTH?
YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!
A few years ago, I took a drive to Gettysburg, PA to visit the battlefields and such. I took a really neat photo of some cannons behind a split rail fence with the rolling countryside and a farm in the distance. Then I turned 90 degrees and took another shot.
Unfortunately, there was a weather front coming through that day and my photo with the cannons was bathed in sunlight but it looked all wrong because the sky was dark and overcast. However, my shot 90 degrees to the left captured the sky as primarily blue with some high, wispy clouds.
Through the magic of photo editing, I took the blue sky and put it in the shot I liked. I then liked the shot so much, I printed it out and have it hanging in my cube.
It hasn't changed my memory of the situation, and I always tell the true story to people who ask about the shot. I don't pretend that I captured something great, but I now have something great that reminds me daily of an interesting time I had.
True story: At work people were making a photo wall of images from their high school days. I'm one of the older ones so I was going to post a prom photo from the 1980s. I scanned it in and said "Shit. My hair is way too damn tall. I don't remember it looking so stupidly '80s!" So I used PS to reduce the height of my hair down to something less laughable.
Of course the final joke is that I went bald and here I am using PS to give myself less hair. :D
See this for a fascinating read about manipulating photographs throughout history.
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/digitaltampering/
It really is a case of 'he who controls the present controls the past...'
That said, I doubt the changes that Photoshop can do will ever become undetectable.
John_Chalisque
I've been working on a photobook of pictures from a recent vacation, and, oddly enough, just last night, I was indeed falsifying our memories. We'd taken a hike up Lower Table Rock in Medford, Oregon and we had photos from of the hike and the view from the top, but the only photo of the Table Rocks themselves was one my wife had taken out of a car window.
I removed a road sign, not very expertly, and... I'm a little ashamed of this but what the heck... I made the sky a little bluer. The photo was actually taken a few days after the hike, when there was some smoke from California in the sky, so I rationalize that it's closer to the way the sky really was...
What's really scary though is that Slashdot story yesterday from SIGGRAPH about an automated program that makes faces more beautiful. On the evidence of that story, it works--and, worse set, doesn't change the faces very much, they still remain recognizable likenesses of the real people.
It will be very interesting when the Canons and Fujis of the world build that into the cameras.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I had a circular (1" diameter) section of my scalp removed last year and replaced with a skin graft from my hip. The hair will never grow back there. Right now, it's a glaring circular spot on my crown, not like a guy who's thinning. It's pretty weird-looking.
We had a friend take family photos a couple of months ago, and I shopped over my spot where it was visible. I personally like this ability from a retouching aspect. I've also fixed many a zit, freckle, scar, etc., for my wedding photo clients. I even had a bride who has different color eyes who wanted them to be the same color.
Yeah, it's not real, but for portraiture, the lighting and a lot of the other techniques (e.g., long lenses for short depth-of-field and compression, which can make big noses look smaller) transcend even Ps. Photography, a lot of times, isn't about 'real'. It's about using light to make a statement, and darkroom (optical or digital) techniques are just part of that process.
registered sex offender on wife's side got a hold of a recent familiy foto he couldn't attend because kids were there and he has a restraining order against him. Adds himself with photoshop afterward and now i am pictured with a convicted sex offender and the foto is on my wife's moither's mantel.
Douglas Quaid: Ever heard of Rekall? They sell those fake memories. Harry: Oh, "Rekall, Rekall, Rekall". You thinking of going there? Douglas Quaid: I don't know, maybe. Harry: Well don't. A friend of mine tried one their "special offers", nearly got himself lobotomised. Douglas Quaid: No shit? Harry: Don't fuck with your brain, pal. It ain't worth it. Douglas Quaid: I guess not.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
I think we'll remember this decade as the time killed reality. Photoshop, subprime mortages, Iraq WMDs, Islam vs the West, economic growth without fundamentals. All these things illusory, that we slowly, reluctantly embrace. We get credit crunches and civil wars, but we don't learn. Why? Because we'd rather believe in something impressive rather than reality.
Stop the brainwash
Stalin was way ahead of all this. i imagine he would of loved photoshop.
"You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton
There is lots of other photo manipulation softwares than photoshop what can do such things as easy and good results. Seems that most people thinks that photoshop is only application what has even as basic tools like clone stamp or curves and thats why they suggest photoshop for everyone. If photoshop CS3 suite is about 1600 dollars and photoshop elements 6 about 160 dollars, there is still very big huge for paintshop pro, GIMP, Paint.NET, Krita or any other cheap tool on markets.
Photographer does not need a photoshop, they need lightroom, aperture or digiKam kind applications.
...or for entertainment purposes I don't care what the hell people do to their photographs. Without editing regular photos nobody would care about "ma lazor" and 300. The second you use the pictures to try to fool someone into thinking you actually had sex with the entire New Zealand cheerleading team (the female one) or that your ex girlfriend really did have two differently sized breasts that's despiccable and should be persecuted. The only problem is it will be harder and harder to prove. The sentence "Whatever is true for you, is true for you" works perfectly here. As long as you don't want to make people believe in your fake photos I don't give a damn. But as we see on a daily basis that border has long been crossed (need I say Beijing '08 fireworks or Iranian missile test?)
Umm, I might be the exception, but I never understood people that actually DO what he is talking about.
My pictures (subject-wise, I do sometimes red-eye or something similiar, but WHY take an X out or something along those lines) are the same as when I took them. Taking your 'X' out of a picture was something others did in high school, and that was majorly mostly self important 'bitches' that did that......
I call bullshit.... And if the majority of the population is doing this (judging the population by myspace isn't actually 'reality') then no wonder we are in such a state today....
--Toll_Free
Except it did so already several times. Admittedly, not during the lifetimes of those involved, but 2000 years later you get a list of Pharaohs where Horemheb follows directly after Amenhotep III. (Hint: there's more than one missing there.) And you take it seriously. Heck, it doesn't even take that long. A mere couple hundred years after the fact, Egyptian historians themselves were compiling lists of Pharaohs with the same missing names and not noticing anything funny about them. I doubt that it was pure conspiracy and with everyone knowing that they're faking history.
Plus, I think that Orwell's point wasn't that you can get people to suddenly forget, but that you can get everyone to play along and shut up. And that they could and did before. Even if you're sure you saw Comrade Yezhov together with Comrad Stalin (to use a real historical example), you keep your mouth shut because you don't fancy a visit from the NKVD. A generation later, already kids are learning a history without Yezhov, and nobody bothers telling them otherwise. The Damnatio Memoria is now complete. Or conversely more than one dictator manufactured a revolutionary history for himself, and placed himself in photos of fights and protests he wasn't actually present at. A generation later, and maybe a purge or two of those who are actually in a position to say he wasn't there, and that has just become history.
Actually, I doubt that many people realize it as clear as you claim. Most people, especially from cultures which heavily faked history, just think that their version is right and everyone _else_ is biased or lying.
Look no further than the Eastern Bloc, where ancient border disputes were exaggerated and occasionally even fictionalized, to keep people's attention focused on those instead of on the present-day internal problems. You know, keep them thinking "OMG, country X is teh enemy because they took one of our provinces 1000 years ago!" instead of looking at who's having a more immediate and substantial impact upon their standard of living. _Especially_ countries which, honestly, had just gotten some province as reward after WW1 or WW2, invented elaborate layers of rationales as to why it was always theirs anyway.
I don't think most of those, even history teachers, actually knew that they're teaching a faked or biased history. Nor that they'd think, basically, "I wouldn't use a history book from country X because their bias is different from ours and it wouldn't sell." They thought more along the lines of "OMG, the people from country X are a bunch of evil liars! They still teach that province Y was originally theirs! They even print historical maps where it's painted as theirs!" (Never mind that at that point in history it actually was "theirs".)
Or as other examples, look at how the Crusades are perceived differently by different people. Or how Napoleon is a national hero to the French and almost an archvillain for some other people. Etc.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the whole point about having a bias is that you're unaware of it. You don't think "man, I'm from country X, I guess I have no choice but to be biased against country Y. Let's see which history books fit my bias." If you can think in those terms, you're already unbiased and rational about it. Being biased is more like already knowing something to be true, and looking for the sources that fit that pre-defined truth.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'm leaving this space blank...
... so I can photoshop in something witty later.
There is a series of tutorials dealing with this very topic. Start with:
You Suck at PhotoShop.
Have gnu, will travel.
The only problem is that Polaroid is abandoning the kind if camera it is famous for. They're willing to license the technology to other companies, however, so it's not necessarily over.
News article from the NY Times here:
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/polaroid-abandons-instant-photography/
When you're taking a picture (or a video, etc), you're choosing the reality you're going to preserve. This just extends those possibilities beyond the realm of what is physically possible. Three different people have three different perceptions of reality, and will take pictures accordingly...
"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
The family Christmas photo for my family included me, my wife, our 9 month old and two cats.
Now it would be perfectly reasonable to expect me and my wife to sit still for 10 seconds while waiting for the camera to snap the picture.
So instead I took 7 pictures and then pieced them all together so it looked like we were all sitting together. Just in case anyone thought it was real I added a snowy scene out the window (we live in AZ) and a faint image of Santa walking in the snow.
It's a great way to put a scene together that would otherwise be impossible. Fake but accurate.
Work Safe Porn
http://www.xkcd.com/331/
Most other substances that allow you to alter your memories are currently illegal. Apparently, this "photoshop" stuff hasn't been fully investigated by the FDA.
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
Retouching IS an evil which destroys the essence of photography. It's about capturing reality, not presenting an ideal.
ALL photography is a lie. That was day one of University class.
For starters, turning something 3D into 2D distorts it. Photographers control that distortion by choice of lens length and aperture. Lighting and perspective can make something 3D appear to be 2D, and vice versa. I've had debates, and there isn't much "photographic truth" that can't have a shotgun of holes blown though it.
Video is a lie because anything can be green-screened, but nobody wants to give up science fiction movies in order to preserve the journalistic integrity of the weather report. It's not the right battle to be fighting.
Further to the article summary, I've also added in people to group shots, on request. My most recent was adding a new employee into some "fleet" photographs for a business. There's not a single customer that would second guess the image. Other pros can spot a couple of shadow discrepancies, but that was a deadline issue for me. The hard part is now for the business owner to keep all the employees, because they probably couldn't afford my retouching fee to take anyone out. ;-)
Once upon a time, the wife asked me to 'shop an old picture to remove someone she wasn't friends with. Turned out pretty good. You can tell something was done, on close inspection, but it looks convincing from a distance. She thought it was good enough to print out and put in a frame in our guest bedroom.
I apologize if this is slightly off topic, but are any parents out there having issues with their kids when exposing them to new/altered media(CGI, photoshop, etc.)
I'm 24 and have watched CGI go from looking like Dire Strait's "Money For nothing" video to being a major supporting character in films. (Gollum anyone?) With graphics advances in the next 10 years, I'm wondering if our generation's wee-uns are going to have to deal with a blurry(or motion-blurry) line between reality and realistic-looking-fantasy.
Alternately, are we going to be the ones with issues when we hit old age? My grandpa watched my cousins and I play Madden 07' for 20 minutes before he realized that the Bears to not play Green Bay in July...
If you tell a lie enough times, it eventually becomes the truth. Thanks Photoshop
Beyond Orwell's 'Memory Hole' in 1984 and the attempted removal of Akhenaten from the ancient Egyptian record, there are some more immediate instances of intentional alteration of what we think we remember. A skilled manipulator can alter what an eyewitness thinks they remember simply by introducing ambiguity into the memory, and more intense work can insert false memories wholesale. But it can also be done in the present, as we've just seen in the CG-augmented opening ceremonies of the Olympics in China, and in sports on network TV.
But it doesn't take prohibitively expensive gear to pull that sort of stunt off anymore, as I explored in a story called "The Halo Effect", which starts like this:
+ + +
Derek shook his head doubtfully at the duct-taped video camera I'd showed him. "Tell me something, Jake. How do you expect me to be inconspicuous carrying that monstrosity around?"
Now, granted, it was a bit on the clunky side, but there wasn't any elegant way to fasten a 3D mouse, cigarette-pack PC and a GPS to it. "Give me a break," I said, nestling the contraption beside my chicken satay on the small food-court table. "It's just a prototype. Early versions of the military's field disinfo kits were probably just as ugly."
The lunchtime crowd threading past our spot near the pizza franchise were too preoccupied to notice the bundle of tech we were arguing over. They also made getting a glimpse of the thing, either in person or with the mall's badly hidden security cams, problematic. We may have overplayed the geek theme a bit to make ourselves part of the visual noise by wearing old, faded convention shirts, but one thing we didn't exude was how risky this meeting really was.
Derek lowered his shake, peered at my handiwork, and tapped one of the puttied-in connectors. "You're sure it'll work?"
+ + + ...You can read the whole thing at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/short-story-the-halo-effect/
P. Orin Zack
"He who controls the past, controls the future" - the Party slogan - 1984 - George Orwell
You might not be able to tell, but a mathematician probably can.
Basically the idea is that if you open up a JPG, and then save it, the overall quality of the image deteriorates in a non-linear fashion with repeated saves. So, if you resave the image at 95% quality, and introduce a known error, then compare that against the original, the deterioration in quality should be homogeneous throughout the image. If not, the image is a composition from multiple sources. Check out slides 42 and 43 in the linked PDF file.
You can get around this, but you need to be VERY careful. Ideally you'd want to start out with raw images, and do all your manipulation saves/loads in some lossless format. Any kind of painting or blending in the image would have to be done carefully, as well, as it would be easy to produce a region of superior quality pixels that would show up in this kind of analysis.
I guess Adobe needs to sue Webster's.
...get over it.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Mythical drawings conveyed the stories they intended to. So to will photoshopepd pictures.
In her story, about her wedding, she was a bride as beautiful as princess. In reality -- No. Photoshop Yes she could tell the story with confidence!
-Alex. http://bit.ly/1iVPtfA
take a baseball bat with v > 10m/sec toward your head. Maybe have some band-aid and aspirin ready! your memory will have changed!
Arrrrrgh! MORE delusion, not less, in our advanced digital and scientific and technological age? It's depressing that technology would be used to merely further enable the delusional behavior, rather than eliminate it.
to alter my memory - there are plenty of other good, and more enjoyable, ways to do that!
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What if the horrible memory to be altered is due to a photograph, say for example, goatse? Not so lucky now are we?
http://monkeynesianeconomics.blogspot.com/
Seriously though, perhaps we're coming to a time when we will only believe some event happened if we get multiple life-recorder video POVs from multiple independent eyewitnesses (on youtube of course. No, wait. Sorry, That video is no longer available.)
It's still pretty technically difficult to alter all of those videos to add or omit the same thing.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
That sentence kind of creates the assumption of "no, not really".
Photoshop is only a recent tool for image manipulation, done digitally. Photos have been doctored in order to alter memories in ways that are even stated in TFA. They worked just as well.
Fact is, we don't "remember" anything. We construct what we view as memory from stored pieces of data. Whatever fits the stored associations with all relevant previous data well enough to be considered our fastest best match gets chosen. It is always wrong to some degree, and is surprisingly easy to alter to a surprising degree of inaccuracy.
False memories, implanted memories, suppressed memories, eye witness reliability, all are topics within the memory studies in cognitive psychology. The #1 top expert in the field is Elizabeth Loftus. She's listed in the references in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory_syndrome which is as good a start as any. Altered photography is just one of the many ways of playing around with long term storage, retrieval and reconstruction.
Come on kids, this is Psych 101 stuff. Just because software gets used doesn't make it newsworthy. Try to get over the hype.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Like you actually were 'smiling' when all those pics from the past were took... lol.
No.. mom, dad, and then you (as a trained adult) all tell their kids and selves to 'SMILE FOR THE CAMERA!" because it looks nicer, because your smile makes that point in time look more pleasant and special than it probably really was.
Don't just assume we're new to self-deception. We've been making ourselves feel better about lesser things for a long long time.
If you wanted to remove an ex from an old snapshot, you had to use a Bic pen or pinking shears. But in the digital age, people treat photos like mash-ups in music, combining various elements to form a more pleasing whole.
Right, I'd spend 1/2 hour concentrating at removing my ex from that perfect trip we did in yosemite so that I can end up with a new pic of me, alone. Wait, no let me add in a penguin!
He obviously never weep looking at past photos. It's not the photos stupid! It's the memories they bring.
Good points, but please consider that composers and orchestra directors were saying the same exact thing when records and audio tape were coming out.
"Oh no - we won't have good music anymore because everyone will be able to record music".
or even today:
"Now everyone can record their band in a home studio for under $25k worth of decent recording equipment. We will no longer have good music"
Libertas in infinitum
I would like inform you that Scarlett Johansson (actress)actually is a clone from original person,who has nothing with acting career.Clone was created illegally by using stolen biomaterial. Original person is very nice(not d**n sexy),most important-CHRISTIAN young lady!I'll tell you more,those clones(it's not only one)made in GERMANY-world leader manufacturer of humans clones,it is in Ludwigshafen am Rhein,N. Bavaria, Mr. Helmut Kohl home town.You can't even imaging the scale of the cloning activity.But warning! H. Kohl clone staff 100% controlling their clones spreading around the world,they are very accurate with that, some of them are still NAZI type disciplined and mind controlled clones,be careful get close with clones you will be controlled too.Original family did not authorize any activity with stolen biological materials,no matter what form it was created,it all needs back to original family control to Cedars-Sinai MedicalCenter in LA.Original Scarlett is not engage,by the way!
A friend of mine and I went to Cambodia, and took some good pictures on a trip. When we got back, I showed him how to edit the photos with his crappy bundled photo software. He was amazed that you could take people, litter, etc out of photographs. I created a monster. He was up all night deleting the other tourists from the pictures so the picture would reflect how he remembered the experience. Is there anything wrong with that? It's an interesting philosophical question.
I once took a picture of a celtic cemetery in ireland. It was full of tourists, hundreds of ugly people were about to ruin the pictures I wanted to take. So I found a position where almost all people were hidden by gravestones, thus being able to capture a picture which suggests that the cemetery was empty.
A picture never reflects reality, even without being photoshopped.
I retouch photos not so that I don't remember the people (okay, let's be clear here: ex-girlfriends) in them, but so that I'm the only one who does. I started editing my parents physical photo albums years and years ago.
Here was my thinking: At some point, I'm going to get married. And at some point, my mom is going to whip this album out to show my wife, and there are going to be pictures of the girl I almost married on a family trip. It's going to be awkward and I will be expected to comment somehow on that picture. I don't want to do that.
So I just remove the girl.
Now that memory belongs only to me. I don't have to disavow my feelings at the time or faux-chuckle at how young I was. The awkward little scene never happens, and I can keep my memory--my bittersweet memory. That trip, as I really experienced it, becomes mine and mine alone. No one, I feel, has a right to share in it if I don't want them to. And I don't want them to.
Looking through my photographic history, you'd think the only girl I ever dated was my wife. The public record is cleaned, and other people's memories can fade. My wife doesn't need to know about my relationships before I met her. She doesn't want to know. And when the record has been cleaned, she doesn't have to know.
But I can remember the happy times, the sad times, the troubled and confused times. I keep those with me. They're mine. They are a part of me, and I don't want to forget. I don't want to change them, and if no one asks about them, I don't have to.
If a photo is causing me undue pain, I seldom throw it away. I just file it. At some point, I can look at it again and it won't hurt. When I die, someone will find the box, I'm sure, and wonder who these people were. And that's the best of all. They won't know. They don't need to know. They're mine.
"...many people believe that snapshots and family photos need no longer stand as a definitive record of what was, but instead, of what they wish it was..."
What a boon for Hillary Clinton! When will it be extended to cover YouTube, media archives, and history books?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/21/AR2008032102989.html
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
In Soviet Russia, photographs alter you!
OK, that was stupid. I admit it.