blogolob links to more evidence that Photoshop is a tool of the Devil Himself.

Generally, I do as few posed wedding photographs as I can, but if you’re going to pose you might as well have some fun. TRASH THE DRESS! takes this to an extreme. Follow the link for pictures—often technically superb ones—of brides swimming in, rolling around in sand in, and setting fire to their bridal gowns. (Be sure to scroll down to the bottom of the front page.)

Here’s a creepy Photoshop disaster.

I’ve written here before about the things you can learn about still photography from movies. Today, via lifehacker, I read about how you can use Photoshop to make your photographs look like movie stills.

The lifehacker blog links to the Smiley Cat Web Design blog where there is a detailed comparison of online image editing software.

lifehacker also explains how you can enlarge the box of “Element Properties” that pops up when you right-click on an image you are viewing in the Firefox Web browser.

Further to my posts about movies and about artificially smoothing out skin, here are some amazing stills from the X-Men: The Last Stand in which Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen were digitally “youthed”. [Click on the little red screen icons that appear in the corner of each image to see the full-size versions.]

For a lighter take on the same movie you can read this post at my other blog, PooterGeek.

A commercial photographer friend of mine who rather likes digital photography complained to me a while back that he had no objection to the manipulation of images, digital or otherwise, with Photoshop to improve them; his real problem was with its growing widespread use by the ignorant and incompetent—and he was talking about people who get paid to use the program—to unintentionally make images look worse.

One of my current bugbears is the artificial selective defocusing of the background in close-up photos of, for example, flowers or delicate items of food. Lifestyle magazines are full of this lately. Some news magazines have even started doing it with portraits of interviewees.

The aim is to imitate the effect of a macro photograph taken with a film camera and the aperture wide open. The result is as appealing as you get when you smear Vaseline on a portrait lens. It can be faked passably by someone who understands how a film photograph really looks (and the underlying optical reasons for it), but it rarely is. It’s the visual equivalent of ear-scratching digital reverb on badly recorded pop music from the 80s. The irony is that digital can be a wonderful medium for macro work; just as new technology makes it easier to produce and manipulate a superb result, the people wielding it lack the talent or care to produce even a mediocre one.

The images of celebrities on the covers of magazines are another source of irritation to me. In most cases the people responsible for creating them have used the Photoshop “heal” tool—or whatever it’s called; I’m not a Photoshop user—so aggressively to smooth away any inhomogeneity in their subjects’ skin that the women (it’s usually women) they depict might as well have been extruded from a rubber mould.

My objection to this is an aesthetic one, but there are of course very good ethical ones about the effect of such unrealistic images of idealised femininity on women who don’t have their own personal stylists, including women who are in reality more beautiful than those held up as an example to them. But such images sell magazines and sell cosmetics and sell plastic surgery—even to the women depicted in them. In fact it’s hard to persuade women, or indeed men, to buy magazines that publish authentic images of other women. Even those rags that specialise in catching celebrities off-guard or off-duty use Photoshop in reverse to exaggerate their physical imperfections.

There are plenty of before-and-after type sites around the Web these days, where you can see how Photoshop is routinely used to manipulate images in the media, but via Paintalicious [link broken 15:05 04Jan07] I saw for the first time [I don't have a TV] an illustration of the whole process shot in time lapse style with a moving picture camera (and paid for by a cosmetics company!). The result is a short film called Evolution.

UPDATE: This reply video is brilliant too.