In her Venus project, Italian artist Anna Utopia Giordano remixes some of the most celebrated nudes of art history, giving them an extreme Photoshop makeover. Essentially, she turns the icons of beauty of bygone centuries into the breasty waifs currently mass-marketed as ideal in today’s society. She asks, “What would have happened if the aesthetic standard of our society had belonged to the collective unconscious of the great artists of the past?” The results are stark and varied. While some ladies might be bettered by a tug at the waistline and pump to the bust, others may seem off and almost disturbingly adolescent. It makes us wonder if the girls of yesteryear — the ones with the skinny forms idolized by today’s fashion industry — would have stared up at the comparatively Rubenesque builds of the pin-ups of their day with envy. See the before-and-after takes side-by-side, and decide whether the digital lipo and breast augmentation was really necessary.
If you’ve visited a newsstand in the past decade or so, then you know it’s impossible to escape digital retouching — and we’re not just talking about the covers of fashion magazines. Tired of all of the “impossibly thin, tall, and wrinkle- and blemish-free models” overrunning the media, researchers Hany Farid and Eric Kee of Dartmouth College have created a new algorithm that mimics human perceptions and can detect when a model’s face has been retouched using Photoshop with 80% accuracy. “The ubiquity of these unrealistic and highly idealized images has been linked to eating disorders and body-image dissatisfaction in men, women, and children,” they write in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They believe that if viewers know how much an image has been altered, it might help. Read More »
We can’t decide if this internet-based program — which uses a rudimentary sketch to magically source and create a corresponding photo — is the future or some sign of the apocalypse. Regardless, it’s one large victory for the Photoshop-challenged. (Cough, cough.) We’ll let Tao Chen, one of the creators, explain how it works.
In light of a recent New York Times article which suggested that photoshopping has had its day (we can thank Kate Winslet, for being the first, years ago, to publicly condemn her own photoshopped form in GQ), we thought it an appropriate time to bring you our favorite outrageous Photoshop mistakes. If this really is a return to a more wholesome era where we’ll accept our celebrities as well as their blemishes, it’s the perfect moment to celebrate the bad and the really, really bad that Photoshop has given us. Read More »
We’re pretty OCD when it comes to Obama kitsch (Andy owns more commemorative plates than your mama and grandmama combined), so imagine our excitement when we discovered an entire internet subculture dedicated to Photoshopping the heads of our leaders onto popular movie posters. Some are reverent, some are insulting, by they all share a deep, profound dedication to that most important of all American ideals: lambasting our leaders. For your enjoyment, we’ve sifted through hundreds of photos to bring you our 14 absolute faves, including Batman, Brokeback, and an unconscionably awesome picture of Palin.
We’re still reeling over the revelation that Donald Rumsfeld included bible-quoting, crusade-style briefings during the invasion of Iraq. While the idea of fighting fundamentalism by calling for holy war is pretty unsettling, our real story here is our military’s stunning lack of familiarity with Photoshop (seriously, could these cut and pastes be any uglier?). The good news: You don’t need any skill at all to alter the alterations. After the jump, a few of our attempts at fill-in-the-blank bible briefings, and the templates so you can make your own.
Listicles draws our attention towards their favorite ads on PSDTUTS’s amazing list of 40 Brilliantly Photoshopped Print Ads, and we’ve decided to pick out the ones that creep us out the most. Sure, technological innovation has enabled advertisements to take a leap into the magical and awe-inspiring, but do they have to be so sensationally weird? The answer is yes, as the ones that kind of scare us actually end up intriguing us more than the happy-go-lucky ones. Our picks after the jump. Kitten croissant, anyone?
