Question Photoshop Digital Painting Algorithms & Editing That Change & Affect Our Perceptions of Reality

72
rate or flag this page
Facebook

By Debby Bruck

It's the New Photoshop

What ever your mind can imagine you can create

Bit Rebels

Minerva is part of Bit Rebels | Touching the Edge

I've written about my adventures with Twitter. Here is one of the benefits of tweeting and making friends. Everyone has their specialty interests, skills and abilities. Each person usually peeps up about what they find interesting in their niche specialty or what they are doing lately. Many people share what is new and innovative, of course, they want to be the first to say, "Don't forget, I was the one who told you all about it!"

Lately, I've been bouncing tweets and retweets back and forth with @Minerva. His name is Richard Darell and his short bio states:

Creatively inspired by everything design and music Richard Darell founded Bit Rebels in mid 2009. Focusing on design, geek and technology the site was to provide short and intense articles about knowledge building topics with a twist. Rapidly expanding Bit Rebels welcomed a slew of new writers to add their flavor to the site. In its first 4 months Bit Rebels will already have had over 1,000,000 views and growing. Richard shares his time between writing and producing songs for international artists as well as being a designer/developer and running BitRebels.com and Minervity.com. Richard hails from Stockholm, Sweden but also spends time in Los Angeles.

I highly recommend visiting this website because of the new cutting edge technology they teach us about each week. 

Is Seeing Believing?

Changing Our Perceptions Changing the Truth

We've always learned that 'seeing is believing' and "A picture is worth a thousand words". However, I think the technology has gotten to a critical point. 

All designers and photoshop artists are absolutely enthralled with the ability of photoshop to enable touching up pictures. And every upgrade makes it easier and easier with more fancy tools to change colors more easily than any darkroom ever invented. 

Not only has it made it easy as 1-2-3 for professional artists and photographers, but it is easy enough for any kid or non-artist to manipulate photos to their delight. Each iteration has enabled people to repair old dusty, ripped, torn, burned, flood damaged photos. But, it used to be that you needed to really know how to use the tools. It used to take loads of time. It was hard to really trace over the finest edges and textures. It was hard to replicate some of the textures. 

Now with this new upgrade in photoshop the computer essentially calculates all the mathematical formulas by statistical probability to produce one smooth finished and polished photo. FANTASTIC YOU SAY! Yes, I suppose in a lot of cases. 

What worries me is the reliability now for the general public to know what is ACTUALLY REAL and what is MANIPULATED and SIMULATED. 

It's been scary enough to see all the recent model transformations that display on the cover of every magazine and advertisement. This gives FALSE impressions of reality, of what standards girls can live up to in this society. PERFECTION is a manifestation of not being able to live with who we truly are and see the beauty in our imperfections. 

What scares me here is that they have just repaired the roof line of the Parthenon. When someone goes on tour what will they see? What will school children think? How many places and photos will be retouched? 

What about using photographs as proof positive about events and records of time? What about documentation? I don't have any answers because we are now living in a strange and new kind of world where what we see is not really reality.  What we view in photographs can be deceiving. 

Please watch the demonstration of this art and tell me what you think?

Photoshop Transformation

Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop Elements 10
Amazon Price: $69.99
List Price: $99.99
Adobe Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements 10
Amazon Price: $73.99
List Price: $149.99
Wacom Bamboo Create Pen Tablet (CTH670)
Amazon Price: Too low to display
List Price: $199.95
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3
Amazon Price: $135.00
List Price: $299.99

Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop CS5 Classroom in a Book
Amazon Price: $29.99
List Price: $54.99
Photoshop Elements 10: The Missing Manual
Amazon Price: $25.74
List Price: $44.99
The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter)
Amazon Price: $29.46
List Price: $54.99
The Photoshop Elements 10 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter)
Amazon Price: $24.87
List Price: $49.99

WHAT'S YOUR OPINION?

Are there ethical and/or legal questions when using photoshop?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Maybe
  • I don't know
See results without voting

The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You
Amazon Price: $15.81
List Price: $25.95

WOW! WOW! WOW! Oh My God!

Google and FaceBook Change Your Reality

Photoshop is not the only programming that can change your vision of reality. Google and FaceBook manipulate through algorithms what you see when surfing and searching the internet. A new book out by MoveOn.org founder Eli Pariser explains how personalization by these monopolies tailors the internet to our likes, our profiles and even our weaknesses.

The Spin On History | LISTVERSE

Photoshop is I was totally awed and surprised when someone recommended that I visit this site that shows Touched Up Photographs in History. Won't You Be Surprised When You See What Has Been Manipulated To Put A Different Spin On Reality. It Makes You Wonder....


Comments

Tatjana-Mihaela profile image

Tatjana-Mihaela 2 years ago

Well Debbie, I was asking myself all these questions before I started to use Photoshop... BTW, I do not have CS5 - yet.

Photoshop is not easy to learn, to imply any effect on the photo you need a lot of effort, and more then anything - patience. Not many people have patience, so not many people are able to use it.

What you see on video clips, is not the same as when you try to do it on real photo.... It is much more complicated and time-consuming then anyone who does not use Photoshop could imagine.

Photoshop is EXPENSIVE TOOL: not many people are willing to buy it.

Photoshop is NOT EASY TO LEARN - I am using only part of its possibilities, and it took me a lot of time to learn it, and I am very quick learner ...the majority of people do not learn how to use it, just buy it because they believe that editing is easy.

To edit real photo - OMG, sometimes I spend several hours on very little adjusting to what I remember it was reality when I took it...real photo never behaves like you see in video clips....

When you take photo, the result is far from realistic. Camera itself does not record this world as it is. So at first we must know that photos we see without editing - DO NOT REPRESENT REALITY... Never. Camera very rarely capture something close to reality.

Techniques you see in Photo shop are not new, for many decades proffesional photographers were using them...just not is software. Now one person needs to spend about 700 US$ for Photoshop, and spend many months to learn how to use it, before that would go to some proffessional photograph and pay much less to achieve the same effect, so I would not be worried about it.

People are very lasy when they need to learn something new,especially when is so time-consuming. I know quit few people who never used Photoshop which they bought.

I hope I answered on your questions.

Just to add one think - everything what exists on this world can be used as positive or negative - JUST EVERYTHING....

Thank you for presenting us new possibilities of CS5. Photographers and artists will love it.

BTW, There are much more sophisticated computer programms for achieving various effects and even create completely new 3D world which never existed in reality, and looks the same as real, which designers and arcithects use.... but these programms costs about 5000 - 7000 US$ and are very, very difficult to learn. Using programms on PC means a lot of headaches, he, he...

vrajavala profile image

vrajavala Level 5 Commenter 2 years ago

in the case of legal questions, of course, an expert can tell whether a document has been photoshopped. Take , for example Barack Obama's so-called Certification of live Birth" it didn't take too long for people to figure out that it was a fraud. However, I think that the person who does the photoshop should be compelled, by law, to designate it as such. For example there are many sites online that there are photoshop jokes, but they are known to be.

Debby Bruck profile image

Debby Bruck Hub Author 2 years ago

Dear Tatjana ~ I agree with the fact that it is certainly NOT easy to learn how to use all the functions in Photoshop and that it is WAY expensive. Yet, these techniques and tools are being taught in schools across the country today and I imagine in other countries. Kids are so facile with the computer that way put their minds to it they can learn anything. And plenty of artists are using Photoshop as their major medium.

Almost every photographer takes digital pictures and does all their touch-ups in photoshop, cleaning up blemishes and halos, special effects etc. They also make wedding videos and lots of other presentations using these tools and tricks. They make good memories!

I think in one way there is more at your disposal to manipulate, more to learn, but once you've mastered a technique it can be automated so it becomes much easier and there are plenty of PLUG-INS that do the work for you.

Dear Vrajavala ~ I really will begin to question more and more the images that I see, EVEN IN THE NEWS MEDIA due to the ability to trick us into believing propaganda.

Tatjana-Mihaela profile image

Tatjana-Mihaela 2 years ago

I agree with you, actually, I also often wonder what is true what is lie after seeing news from media....I would not worry to much about Photoshop...there are much more sophysticated softwares which are able to create watever you want and if somebody is paid for that, this person would not mind to trick the world. And that is called "marketing"...

People are especially sensitive on visual effects...whatever they see they believe that is truth...up till the moment somebody calls expert to check the facts, if ever, damage is already done.

This fact can be also used on phositive ways...

Submit a Comment
Members and Guests

Sign in or sign up and post using a hubpages account.



    • No HTML is allowed in comments, but URLs will be hyperlinked
    • Comments are not for promoting your Hubs or other sites

    working