PS in NYT, crafty imaging tech, & more

  • In "I Was There. Just Ask Photoshop," Alex Williams of the NY Times writes about the pervasiveness of image manipulation in our culture.  Regarding the manipulation of family photos, I found this bit interesting:

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

  • Seemingly everyone ever is forwarding me this cool demo showing ideas for enhancing video using still images.  I mentioned the work in June, but it’s worth noting that the developers have been collaborating with Adobe folks.
  • The You Suck At Photoshop crew has been posting new bits, involving the Baldwin brothers, among many other things.

0 thoughts on “PS in NYT, crafty imaging tech, & more

  1. Hello jack,
    Great post and our friend Donnie, by the way, he lives about 89 miles from me, I will stay away from this madman
    Ken in KY

  2. John, what is the proper way of turning in suggestions for the Adobe applications?
    I’ve read on the post announcing FreeHand’s retirement that different people would suggest features for Illustrator CSNext and that you would forward their gripes to the Illustrator team.
    I would love for Illustrator CSNext to have live updates when using the Eyedropper. If I’m making a Gradient Mesh and picking colors from in between points, I will have to let go of the mouse button, see the update and undo if I don’t like it.
    Secondly, I’m finding the Navigator palette more and more useful, lately. Why can’t we zoom the preview in the Navigator palette? We can only use it to zoom on our main window. A slider for it’s own zoom would be great.
    Also, all the Preview checkboxes should start out activated… I find it hard to believe people in our days have computers slow enough that they would prefer to edit the effects while “blind” and after that tick the Preview checkbox, to see whether their changes were good.
    Can your blog post more information regarding Illustrator? I know you’re primarily involved with Photoshop, but I bet you can give us some small information on CSNext, from time to time.

  3. I was sitting on my soapbox this morning, looking for some way to procrastinate. My apologies for the length of the comment.
    There is a facet of the NYT issue that I have not seen discussed on the web. It is the public’s lack of understanding of Photoshop’s processes. Lacking a basic understanding of process, there is a corresponding lack of appreciation of the result. That is, for most people, a Photoshop image is nothing more than a technological trick, a simple (or devious) alteration of an otherwise fine photograph.
    For those of us who live and breathe PS, it seems natural to admire the grace of an Eismann masking technique or gasp at a Margulis color change. When we see the results of these masters, we appreciate them more for understanding the processes underlying them. Not so for the public, for which the process is still only juju, a digital trick of computer.
    By contrast, the processes of traditional art forms are both more apparent and better understood by the public. The public can go to a nearby museum and press its collective nose up to a master’s work, where the brushstrokes are literally recorded for posterity. While the public may not be an expert in all it took to create the image, it understands enough to appreciate the result.
    I think Adobe’s needs something like a “Poor Richard’s Photoshop” or “Photoshop for the Common Man” initiative. (Apologies to both feminists and Aaron Copland). It would be a marketing outreach to bring to the public just enough of the beauty of the PS processes so that the next time the public saw an altered photo, it would not be an altered photo, it would be a piece of Photoshop art.
    But having solved all of Adobe’s problems, I guess I should move on and solve some of my own. 🙂

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