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Photoshop 1.0 came out in 1990 and didn’t have layers, live preview, multiple levels of undo, or many other features. See some current Photoshop experts wax nostalgic and wrestle with the lack of features in this entertaining video.
We’ve come a long way, baby.
“Darth” is a pseudonymous Twitter user with a terrific sense of humor, a loyal and highly interactive following, and a special gift for fast, funny, topical, reference-heavy, and often bespoke Photoshop work.
Here are five of @darth’s photos just from the last week.
Reactions to John Lewis at the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom:
*poster* RT @MikeIntaglietta: CC @darth RT @HayesBrown: John Lewis: National Treasure. http://t.co/ZTg86i2iEE
— darth NSA Red Panda™ (@darth) August 28, 2013
When the hashtag “#NSAromcom” started floating around, @darth made many many posters to match Twitter users’ proposed titles:
*poster* RT @ryanbeckwith: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Data Mining #NSAromcom pic.twitter.com/CQccHpqchz
— darth NSA Red Panda™ (@darth) August 24, 2013
This poster, featuring a relatively rare appearance by @darth him/her/itself, was just a response to Reuters’ Margarita Noriega tweeting that summer was ending:
@margafret wait is that sci-fi pic.twitter.com/Uf2kZlC17V
— darth NSA Red Panda™ (@darth) August 25, 2013
I don’t even know what happened here, but it’s beautiful and funny for reasons I can’t explain or understand:
“wait…what just happened..” RT @LisaMcIntire: CAN YOU IMAGINE BEING CALLED “A GREAT MORAL FORCE” BY JOAN DIDION??? http://t.co/8EnPip9sHa
— darth NSA Red Panda™ (@darth) August 23, 2013
But this one is pretty easy for just about anyone to get:
@burritojustice @NortonI @stevesilberman @mat pic.twitter.com/OWM5gpoxpm
— darth NSA Red Panda™ (@darth) August 25, 2013
Update: I challenged @darth to make a poster for the movie “The World According to @Darth,” using The World According to Garp as a reference. In less than thirty minutes, the poster was born, complete with tiny, perfect textual details that you have to see at full size to fully appreciate.
ok tim RT @tcarmody: I wish @darth would make a poster for “The World According to @Darth” http://t.co/KhKiPbwxbg pic.twitter.com/MPlMEXsua3
— steak and dartatoes™ (@darth) August 30, 2013
A photo restorer walks through the process of restoring a tintype photograph from the 1870s.
My standard operating procedure is to use an ultra-high resolution camera combined with a top-of-the-line macro lens to photograph tintypes. I use strobe lights to illuminate the artwork. Strobes produce “hard” light, much like the sun on a clear day. In addition to the strobes, I place a polarizer over the camera lens and polarizer gels over the strobe lights. This eliminates all reflections and enables the camera to pick up a greater tonal range along with more detail.
The original photo is on the left and an intermediate step on the right; you’ll need to click through to see the finished product.
Update: This is a better restoration…the one above is too airbrushed, like the photo on the cover of a fashion magazine.
Watch as CMYKiller, Philter Phil, DJ Dodge, MC Burn and the rest of the posse rap us through some Photoshop tutorials.
I’m ropin’ all the honeys with my magnetic lasso
If only real life had Photoshop.
Dodging the burnt toast was a fave moment.
This is stunning. A version of this was presented at SIGGRAPH in August 2009. (via jimray)
The hamfisted Air Force One NYC photo op cost taxpayers more than $320,000. Photoshop expert Scott Kelby says that using the graphics editing program for two minutes could have saved a lot of money and trouble.
Update: The NY Daily News had the same idea. (thx, @tshane)
Cory Arcangel has a new show opening tonight at Team Gallery in Soho called Adult Contemporary. I got a peek at it last night and my favorite piece is called Photoshop CS: 110 by 72 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient “Spectrum”, mousedown y=1098 x=1749.9, mouse up y=0 4160 x=0. It’s easy enough to whip up your own by following those instructions in Photoshop but the print itself is gorgeous. When you get up close to it, there is no discernible gradation between the colors and, because it’s so uniform and smooth and glossy and big, you lose your sense of depth perception and you don’t really know how close you are to it. I almost fell over looking at it because I was so disoriented.
A real life version of the Photoshop desktop. I love the little color swatches box. (thx, mark)
Illustrator Bob Staake explains the process behind his cover on this week’s politically themed New Yorker, including rejected alternatives and a video progression of the finished design. Staake still uses a copy of Photoshop 3.0 on MacOS 7 to do his illustrations. That was a great version of Photoshop…I remember not wanting to switch myself. (via df)
Update: Staake uses OS X with MacOS 9 running in the background:
Let me clear up today’s rumor: I do NOT work in OS 7. I use OSX and run classic (9.0) in the background. Photoshop 3.0? Yes, STILL use that.
Dorothy Gambrell applies every Photoshop filter to an image in order and posted the results, including all the tweens. (via waxy)
Photographer Sam Haskins, well known for doing in-camera montage, briefly describes how composite photos were made in the time before Photoshop.
Its a single exposure with the model viewed through optical glass at 45° and the fabric positioned to the side. At the time there was zero retouching after the event. Now of course I have the luxury of scanning the transparency to clean and refine the image in Photoshop - God bless its digital socks.
Fashion photo retouching (i.e. high-brow Photoshopping) gets the New Yorker treatment with this story on retoucher Pascal Dangin, one of the best in the business.
In the March issue of Vogue Dangin tweaked a hundred and forty-four images: a hundred and seven advertisements (Estée Lauder, Gucci, Dior, etc.), thirty-six fashion pictures, and the cover, featuring Drew Barrymore. To keep track of his clients, he assigns three-letter rubrics, like airport codes. Click on the current-jobs menu on his computer: AFR (Air France), AMX (American Express), BAL (Balenciaga), DSN (Disney), LUV (Louis Vuitton), TFY (Tiffany & Co.), VIC (Victoria’s Secret).
The article touches too briefly on the tension between reality and what ends up in the magazines and advertisements. As Errol Morris points out on his photography blog, it is often difficult to find truth in even the most vérité of photographs. Even so, the truth seems to be completely absent from Madonna’s recent photo spread in Vanity Fair that was retouched by Dangin, especially this one in which a 50-year-old Madonna looks like a recent college graduate who’s never lifted a weight in her life.
The uncanny valley comes into play here, which we usually think of in terms of robots, cartoon characters, and other pseudo anthropomorphic characters attempting and failing to look sufficiently human and therefore appearing creepy and scary. With an increasing amount of photo retouching, postproduction in film, plastic surgery, and increasingly effective makeup & skin care products, we’re being bombarded with a growing amount of imagery featuring people who don’t appear naturally human. People who appear often in media (film & tv stars, models, cable news anchors & reporters, miscellaneous celebrities, etc.) are creeping down into the uncanny valley to meet up with characters from The Polar Express. I don’t know about you but a middle-aged Madonna made to look 24 gives me the heebie-jeebies. Perhaps the familar uncanny valley graph needs revision:
Based on a paper about “copy-move forgery”, a couple of programmers have come up with a program that algorithmically detects whether a photograph has been photoshopped using the cloning technique. It works very well on Adnan Hajj’s doctored Reuters photo of an attack on Beirut.
See also: how to detect photo forgeries.
The Photoshop Disasters blog catalogs missteps in photo retouching and graphic design. The most recent post shows the cover of a Nintendo DS game that has an embarrassingly invisible iStockPhoto watermark on it. The three-handed lady is my favorite.
These half-n-half celebrity face mashups are unsettling. “The right half of a face has to be from one celebrity and the left half from another.” The Bill/Hillary and the Cruise/Holmes ones are especially good.
Photoshopped series of photos of people kissing themselves. Sort of disturbingly erotic, in an erotically disturbing way.
Clever technique for pinching the colors from famous paintings using the Match Color tool in Photoshop. “The Old Masters of painting spent years of their lives learning about color. Why let all their effort go to waste on the walls of some museum when it could be used to give you a hand with color correction?”
How to use Photoshop to make your car look like one of the characters in Pixar’s Cars.
Over the holidays, Mike Monteiro discovered there was a Nacho Libre game for the Nintendo DS. Thinking that an arbitrary choice for a movie tie-in game, he started the DS Tie-In Games I Wanna Play group on Flickr to showcase other possible odd media tie-ins for the DS. Some of my favorite submissions so far include: The Passion of the Christ, Birth of a Nation, Empire, Remains of the Day, My Dinner with Andre (Bon Mot controller sold separately), Super Mario Bros, Learning GNU Emacs, Requiem for a Dream, The Cremaster Cycle, and Getting Things Done.
Here’s a couple of ones that I’ve done: Dancer in the Dark and The New Yorker Draw Your Own Cover Electronic Entertainment (with noncompulsory coöperative mode), pictured below.
If you join the group, there’s a Photoshop kit you can download to join in the fun.
It’s fun Fotoshop Friday! (Phun Photoshop Phriday?) Anyway, here’s a bunch of pictures of celebrities Photoshopped to look like Star Wars characters. I’m surprised there weren’t more celebrities frozen in carbonite. (via fandumb)
A collection of two-minute Photoshop tricks, delivered via text, audio, and video.
Photoshop tutorial: how to add 20 years to someone in a photograph. (via photojojo)
Tutorial on adding surprisingly realistic beards to people with Photoshop. (via photojojo, who’s having a contest for the best bearded woman)
Here’s my first attempt at a panorama of the Mill City Museum and the surrounding area:
Here’s a larger version (3000 x 912, 312 KB).
I’m not entirely satisfied with this version. I used a shareware program for OS X called DoubleTake to stitch the images together and it’s not suited for this kind of scene. Too much of the image turned out blurry & fuzzy and you have little control over which pieces of the image take precedent over the others. Some of this was probably user error and on some parts of the image (when there were less pieces involved), it did a wonderful job. I’m going to stitch a version in Photoshop by hand (and put a black background behind it) to see how it compares.
Update: Lots of photo stitching suggestions from people. Jake turned me onto Autostitch a few weeks ago, but alas it’s not available for the Mac, nor do I have one of those fancy MacBooks on which to run Parallels. Calico is an OS X app that uses the Autostitch code, I may check that out. Photoshop CS has a built-in Photomerge tool that does panoramas. Hugin is a GPLed image stitcher that works on Windows and OS X. (thx galen, dan, jake, arlo, joe, glen, jason, and nicholas)
Pictures of celebrities photoshopped to look like senior citizens. Some of them are amazing.
How to fix photos that are too dark or too light with Photoshop. Color range + levels is your friend.
Script for producing sparklines (a la Edward Tufte) in Photoshop.
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