manipulation

Skin care company Dove is speaking out on the issue of "fake beauty" being promoted in photographs through Photoshopping. Rather than address the issue directly at first, the company decided to speak out directly to those responsible for "fake" images by doing some clever guerrilla marketing. It essentially pranked retouchers through the Web by releasing a fake Photoshop beauty Action that undoes manipulation rather than creates it.

Portland, Oregon-based photographer and visual artist Jim Kazanjian is like the M. C. Escher of architectural photography. His art pieces appear to be photos of some of the strangest looking buildings found in the weirdest locations, but the reason the images are so dreamlike is because they came from Kazanjian's mind rather than the real world.

The vast majority of my photographic work is environmental portraiture, corporate and editorial photography, and interiors, some of my commercial photography does include product photos. Quite honestly, some of this stuff is pretty straightforward, take a nice representative image of the product on a clean white backdrop so it integrates onto a website (also white) seamlessly. Sometimes a client gives me a bit more artistic license, and sometimes I get to do a shoot that's just for me.

Upon first glance, artist Thomas Barbèy's surreal photomontages may seem rather amateur when compared with all the highly-polished photomanipulations that are floating around on the Internet. However, one simple fact will make you see the pieces in an entirely different light: Barbèy shoots film and uses in-camera and darkroom techniques to create the works!

That's right: he eschews Photoshop and digital trickery in favor of analog processes.

Back in 2009, Popular Photography announced the winning photos of its latest Reader’s Photos Contest. Two of the winners (shown above) had some photographers scratching their heads, due to the fact that they're "Photoshop jobs" rather than non-manipulated stills.

It's not easy to remember life before Photoshop. When we do, we think of a world where picture were straightforward, always showing exactly what happened to be in front of the lens when the exposure was taken. But that's not entirely the case.

Trick photography has been around for centuries, and even though the folks in Victorian times weren't nearly as concerned with artificially slimming down, they did like to have some photographic fun once in a while. This set of headless photographs from the 19th century is a great example of the kind of 'fun' we're talking about.

When Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast back in October, the photograph above was widely circulated by people who believed that it showed the storm bearing down NYC. It doesn't. The image is actually a composite photograph that combines an ordinary photo of the Statue of Liberty with a well-known image by weather photographer Mike Hollingshead.

Here's a step-by-step tutorial on how to create a photograph of you holding yourself up. I hope it will give you a good idea of how I create this type of image so that you can create a similar image yourself! Obviously, this is not the only way to create this type of image, but it is the way I have found most believable, as the connection between the two subjects actually occurs in real life. Enjoy!

Last week, Sports Illustrated magazine published the above photograph by US Presswire photographer Matthew Emmons. Found in the "Leading Off" section, the photo shows the Baylor Bears football team celebrating after their upset victory over the #2 ranked Kansas State Wildcats.

The image has many people talking, not because of the unlikely event that it captures, but because it appears to be heavily manipulated. And it's not just the fact that the picture looks like it passed through an HDR program, but that the Baylor football players didn't wear green jerseys during that game. They wore black.

The winner of this year's Landscape Photographer of the Year contest, photographer David Byrne, has been disqualified and stripped of his title for violating contest rules regarding digital manipulation. His winning image, titled "Lindisfarne Boats" and shown above, is a black-and-white photo showing beached fishing boats with Lindisfarne Castle in the background.

Recently, a friend and photographer Ben Jacobsen of Ben Jacobsen Photo got his work into a third gallery. One of the gallery owners asked him “Is your work Photoshopped?” This is also a popular question often asked at Art Fairs and Photography exhibits. Why is this question relevant to some viewers? If you are asking this, do you know what Photoshopping means? Better yet, What does that word mean to you, and what is it that you are asking?

Jonathon Keats of Forbes has a great piece discussing truth in photography and …

People often say that, for whatever reason, dogs often look like their owners. 27-year-old Swiss photographer Sebastian Magnani has been attracting a good deal of worldwide attention lately for his photo project that takes that idea to the next level. Titled Underdogs, the series of photos features portraits showing dog faces carefully Photoshopped onto the bodies of their owners.

Earlier this year, we wrote about a new company called Fourandsix (pronounced "forensics"), a collaboration between a former Photoshop product manager and a professor who's an expert in digital forensics. The goal of the new startup was to build powerful tools that would make detecting digital photo manipulation easy. Well, the first Fourandsix product is now available.

Called FourMatch, it's an extension for Photoshop CS5/CS6 that "instantly distinguishes unmodified digital camera files from those that may have been edited."

Photographs of of Syria these days are filled with grim sights of pain and suffering. One Austrian newspaper apparently …

The New York Times has an interesting article examining how retouching has spread …

German photographer Falk Lumo has an interesting post on his blog regarding full …

It's common knowledge that models in magazines are Photoshopped to look the way that they do -- often to the detriment of the young girls that aspire to have these computer generated figures -- but for the most part protests have come in the form of ad campaigns like Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty. But in the past couple of weeks, 14-year-old Julia Bluhm decided to take a different approach.

Snapping a self-portrait of oneself in a mirror is something every photographer has probably done before, but have you …

Shaofeng Xu’s photo of a protestor climbing a high-voltage electricity tower won Honorable Mention in the Contemporary Issues category of the World Press Photo 2012 contest.

Here's an awesome TED lecture in which digital artist Erik Johansson discusses creating realistic "photographs" of impossible scenes.

Erik Johansson creates realistic photos of impossible scenes -- capturing ideas, not moments. In this witty how-to, the Photoshop wizard describes the principles he uses to make these fantastical scenarios come to life, while keeping them visually plausible.

The Sacramento Bee has suspended award-winning staff photographer Bryan Patrick after it was …

Filmmaker Jesse Rosten created this satirical commercial for Fotoshop by Adobé with the …

News photo agencies EPA, AFP, and Reuters have all issued kill orders for a photo of Kim Jong-il's funeral procession released by the Korean Central News Agency, the state news agency of North Korea. The photo (above at bottom) raised red flags after a comparison with a Kyodo News photo taken just seconds earlier revealed that a number of people had vanished from the scene. The New York Times writes,

A side-by-side comparison of the full images does point to a possibly banal explanation: totalitarian aesthetics. With the men straggling around the sidelines, a certain martial perfection is lost. Without the men, the tight black bands of the crowd on either side look railroad straight.

Perhaps it was a simple matter of one person gilding the lily.

The US is following the UK’s lead in banning advertisements for having too much digital manipulation. The …

What if all advertising photos came with a number that revealed the degree to which they were Photoshopped? We …

New York-based artist Matt Wisniewski creates digital collages by blending fashion and nature photographs together into surreal images. The images remind us of photographer Dan Mountford's double exposure photographs, except Wisniewski uses digital manipulation rather than in-camera trickery.

Venezuelan artist Jesús González Rodríguez has a project called 1/2 that features strange Photoshopped portrait illusions. They each show half a face, but is that face looking to the left or towards the camera?

A Lancome advertisement featuring Julia Roberts caused a stir back in July after it was banned by …

Advertising photographer Paul Ripke's project "Man Babies" features portraits of parents with their children... with their heads swapped. Ripke enlisted the help of two professional Photoshoppin' friends, and says that the photographs were purely for fun and to test the limits of Photoshop.