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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."
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??
OK, let's try and get organized:
Photoshop vs. GIMP here --->
EMACS vs. Vi there ---->
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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"
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
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.)
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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.
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.
Burning of the Library of Alexandria, the Witch Scare of the middle ages, Shakespeare's re-write of British history in Macbeth...
"I have ancient proof that space aliens wrote the Declaration of Independence, That Howard Hughes wrote a will, that Elvis had a love child with _____ fill in bimbo du jours.. oh and do be careful, the ink's not quite dry"..
Changing our collective memory is nothing new.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
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.
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.
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.
>> By following the below guidelines, you can help Adobe protect the Photoshop brand name.
I woke up just this morning wondering how I could do this. Thanks!
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!
Photoshop is not a verb
I know! Thats why I've been gimping stuff for the past few years.
Check out Unsealed: Whispers of Wisdom! http://unsealed.k3rnel.net It's an action-RPG about Open Sourcerers.
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.
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'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 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
See this for a fascinating read about manipulating photographs throughout history.
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/digitaltampering/
...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?)
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.
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/
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.