
How 25 years of Photoshop changed the way we see reality - pmcpinto
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/02/19/how-25-years-of-photoshop-changed-the-way-we-see-reality
======
jejones3141
I have to laugh at the quote of someone referring to "the last woman to
inhabit a world where the camera never lied." Before Photoshop there was
forced perspective, soft-focus filters, control over lighting (what's with
that leaked photo of Cindy Crawford? It shows her in literally the worst light
possible, to emphasize every wrinkle, sag, and every bit of cellulite) and
other ways to get the image one wants, and those techniques are still around.
The camera records what light hits it, but the lies can occur well before that
point.

~~~
woofyman
Photographs have been retouched and airbrushed for a long, long time. Long
before computers and Photoshop.

~~~
pconner
I wonder if there was ever controversy in the pre-photography world over
painted portraits not accurately portraying their subjects

------
Shinkei
I have always been personally bothered by the way images are photoshopped to
the extreme. For me, it feels fraudulent to have an advertisement of a product
and use an image that has been doctored. I mean, we can think of a whole
spectrum of this phenomenon that an increasing number of people would be
uncomfortable with:

A photo of a mountain scenery published only for art's sake.

A magazine cover of a woman with a few scrapes from a car accident
photoshopped out.

A makeup ad with a woman's wrinkles and blemishes photoshopped out, instead of
adequetly concealed by their product.

A diet product with before and after photos doctored to show the customers
thinner.

A hotel ad with an ocean view, which is actually photoshopped. The actual view
is 50% obscurred by a building.

Read these examples and consider your feeling of discomfort with each. I think
there is a sliding scale of 'wrongness' when using Photoshop and IMHO if a
photo is used for an ad, it should have a disclaimer if any digital
manipulation was used.

~~~
cheatsheet
I started using Photoshop when I was maybe 12 years old. I learned to be
skeptical of every image, every advertisement, and there is so much more
psychology, philosophy and art theory I could go into. I am 'female' and I
grew up thinking the Photoshopped pictures of myself on social sites were the
'right' pictures, the 'right' self. To put a long story short, an eating
disorder very mildly describes the kind of maladaptive clash I experienced
between my physical form and my intellectual one.

I imagine the same thing happened when journalism was revealed to be yellow
journalism, and other technologies slowly reveal their effect through
generational adaptation.

In one sense, it's the same thing that happens because of the cycles of birth
and death; technologies and cultures are born, and they are subject to death
too. It's not surprising, but it is surprising, because the stuff that changes
is not always the stuff you expect to change. In another sense, it's screwed
up, and the only thing I can really hope for is that some kind of overarching
balance can be intelligently directed towards and balance can be achieved. The
idea that this is actually progress, and not just yet another side of the same
coin that will eventually flip again.

~~~
Shinkei
I agree with the dissonance between physical and psychological self you
mentioned and it's great that you have achieved that insight. Unfortunately,
it seems like most people do not understand this dichotomy and there are also
many (maybe the majority?) who do not understand how commonly images are
photoshopped to be almost unrecognizable from their original.

~~~
cheatsheet
There's little point to understanding it unless it affects you. Most people
think things don't affect them, and sometimes it can seem like just thinking
about it can make it affect you when it didn't affect you before. Even I
suggest I have a higher level of skepticism than the norm. But I can't really
measure that without affecting my level of skepticism. So my psychological
understanding might be high right now, but my logical correctness and
scientific methodology are probably reduced.

This might have made me upset when I still had my eating disorder, but
otherwise I chalk it up to a habit of complaining. The other insight I guess
is that people can have correct, rapid switching thoughts and ideas that
continuously contradict one another until they achieve a kind of abstract
balance.

To me it's one form of maturation. Other people could experience the same
thing without the capacity to verbally express it. They may have the insight
without the words.

------
wallflower
Many years ago, I remember being absolutely enthralled by learning about how
the first version of Photoshop was developed by the brothers, John and Thomas
Knoll, in Dr. Dobb's Magazine.

"Tom is really a super programmer. He's one of the best engineers I know. He
just wrote this terrific, great code."

"It became much bigger than we thought it would, but it kept getting better
and better."

The original source code (thank you, Computer History Museum!!)

[http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/adobe-photoshop-
source-...](http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/adobe-photoshop-source-code)

One of the characteristics of brilliant engineers (and engineering teams of
the likes of Jeff Dean's) may be that that they create the opposite of
technical debt as they work...

> From the time he decided to stop school until Version 1.0 shipped was almost
> two years. It became much bigger than we thought it would, but it kept
> getting better and better.

Tom is really a super programmer. He's one of the best engineers I know. He
just wrote this terrific, great code.

Version 1.0 was a usable tool largely because I was trying to use it to solve
real-world problems. I would run into something that would just stymie me.
There's got to be a way of doing this, and then Tom would scratch his head and
go, "That would be hard." He would think about it a while. I would talk to him
a few days later and he would say, "I was thinking about that and I had this
great idea."

I was goading him a little bit, too. I would say, "You know what I really want
to do? I want to make one of these selections so that I can like select some
area and then the paint only affects just the area selected." Tom would say,
"Oh, thats going to be impossible to make that go real time. It's going to be
really slow." I'd say "Oh, come on, Tom. I'll bet you can do that." About a
week later he would say, "I was thinking about it, and I think I've got a
way." It was often a whole lot of exchanges like that where at first Tom
thought it would be really hard, but he would keep thinking about it. He's
brilliant that way, and he would come up with a clever solution to the
problem...

"A Conversation with John Knoll"

[http://www.drdobbs.com/a-conversation-with-john-
knoll/184410...](http://www.drdobbs.com/a-conversation-with-john-
knoll/184410606)

~~~
nailer
HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9085514](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9085514)

------
_cudgel
It is very important to remember, particularly to those of us who "live"
online, that all news and entertainment media -- not just static images, but
video, audio, text, human interactions -- are tightly controlled, manipulated,
and very often scripted.

Photoshop may be the poster child, but this is a much bigger problem than one
piece of software. Social Media seems to be taken as unassailable fact by the
press, and those "facts" from a fake world are then seemingly used to justify
actions taken in the real world.

Damned near no one seems to care the emperor has no clothes -- and this puff
piece does little to address the actual ramifications of living this way --
not so long as they're getting their tweets and instagrams.

~~~
rokhayakebe
_all news and entertainment media -- not just static images, but video, audio,
text, human interactions -- are tightly controlled, manipulated, and very
often scripted._

What could/would be a solution?

~~~
_cudgel
I obviously don't have a silver bullet. Some steps I've personally taken
include things like canceling television service and canceling subscriptions
to infotainment publications, whether in print or online. I've taken steps to
minimize the number of distractions I'm forced to deal with, and don't
participate in _most_ social media. For me, these distractions amount to
enough mental noise that I have a hard time thinking critically about anything
beyond my job. Without them, I've found numerous benefits, not the least of
which is the ability to think more clearly and decide for myself whether a
news item passes the smell test. I would advocate everyone at least try this.
I suspect you'll find you have way more free time than you think, and the
mental quiet will do most people some amount of good.

These personal steps don't really do anything to curb the actions of others.
Frankly, I just don't have any solid solutions to offer. You can't legislate
this sort of thing. It might be possible to break up some large media
conglomerates under anti-trust laws, but given the amount of control the
current media have to control the conversation, that seems like a non-starter
to me. Ending the 24-hour news cycle would help too -- but again, there's a
market, it exists, and we can't just wave a magic wand to get rid of it.

I think it's possible that the infotainment industry could atrophy and die off
given enough lack of interest or enough obvious outright lying that their
credibility becomes laughable. (As an aside, I've found the reaction of NBC to
Brian Williams' "big fish" stories to be just perfect. Can't let the head news
anchor call the whole operation's credibility into question, and so the
punishment was predictably harsh.) I don't see that death as even remotely
imminent.

I'm definitely open to suggestions!

~~~
rokhayakebe
I too have no active social media accounts save HN. I do try to read thing
critically, but I do not have enough knowledge to do so. I have no interest
in, and do not follow news, but I must admit this is not the way of a citizen.

Could a Wikipedia for news be a solution? But even then, it is very easy for a
few to come together and hijack the thread.

------
jkot
> The problem is that 25 years after Photoshop launched, we’d much prefer
> manipulations of reality to reality itself.

That photoshoped picture of Beyonce could be easily achieved in 'reality' as
well. Photographers and make-up artists have many tricks.

This sort of celebrity is probably paid thousands dollars per minute and its
cheaper to photoshop her, than pay her for 2 hours to apply 1 mm layer of make
up.

~~~
personlurking
The quoted part reminds me of what's known as 'staged authenticity' in tourism
studies.

"Dean MacCannell formulates his theory of modern tourism and approaches the
question of authenticity in The Tourist. He uses the concept of staged
authenticity to explain the tourist experience; people know what they are
experiencing is not real and authentic but feel content with it anyway.
According to MacCannell, staged authenticity is authenticity’s negation, an
attempt to move beyond the front-back binary made famous by Erving Goffman,
very much similar to what Edward Bruner, also hoping to transcend such
binaries as authentic – inauthentic and front – back, wrote in Culture on
tour.

To Goffman, all social action is play, and he uses theater as an analogy when
he explains how people will alter their social roles according to their
position (front or back) on the stage. The idea of people necessarily
withholding some aspects of their personality will ultimately lead to a
position where the tourist is always confronted with a staged play, never
allowed backstage to experience authenticity. Bruner and MacCannell have,
however, different ideas about what is to be found backstage. For MacCannell
the back is a place where secrets are only popularly thought to be kept but,
in fact, do not exist. While MacCannell explicitly denies the possibility of
authenticity residing in the back regions, Bruner stated that MacCannell
believes there is always true and real at the back."

~~~
soneca
Also reminds me of an article about the Cloverfield movie (can't find it right
now). They made the head of the Liberty Statue on the actual size it would be
when cut by the monster and falling among people in the streets. But the
feedback from a closed beta exhibition showed that audience would find find
that "small" head comically ridiculous and inaccurate. So for the film release
they made it much bigger so people would find it realistic.

------
rjl97
See also: Lev Manovich - Inside Photoshop
[http://computationalculture.net/article/inside-
photoshop](http://computationalculture.net/article/inside-photoshop)

"How does media authoring software shape the media being created, making some
design choices seem natural and easy to execute, while hiding other design
possibilities? How does media viewing / managing / remixing software affect
our experience of media and the actions we perform on it? How does software
change what 'media' is conceptually?

"This article approaches some of these questions via the analysis of a
software application that has become synonymous with 'digital media' – Adobe
Photoshop."

------
Jimmy
> The problem is that 25 years after Photoshop launched, we’d much prefer
> manipulations of reality to reality itself.

I wouldn't. Not in this case, anyway. The picture on the right is utterly
unappealing.

------
johansch
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantel_Paintbox](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantel_Paintbox)
is really the pioneer in this area.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyCmIH06rQE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyCmIH06rQE)
\- "Quantel DPB 7001 Paintbox - 1981"

------
baha
Well, at least those 99% of us that spend more time in front of virtual
reality than Real Reality...

How Did They Do To Make Us Behave Like This??

------
benihana
Sigh. The title made me think this could have been a great article, but it was
just a puff piece about some reactions of women to finding out that photos get
retouched. No examining how photoshop alters our view of reality, no thoughts
about how this might shift what is normal, no insights into potential
backlashes and what we might do as a society to fight this, no consideration
to how this affects women of color or (gasp) men. Just a few words and links
showing that photos get retouched and that this is bad for women? I'm not
sure, the author never really makes any point.

~~~
nailer
Essentially the whole idea of 'pictures as evidence' has disappeared.

