Sunday, August 17, 2008

The new (Photoshop) reality

NYT has an article titled "I Was There. Just Ask Photoshop." about manipulating personal photographs to define your own reality: "As image-editing software grows in sophistication and ubiquity, alterations go far beyond removing red-eye and whitening teeth. They include substituting head shots to achieve the best combination of smiles, deleting problematic personalities or adding family members who were unable to attend important events, performing virtual liposuction or hair restoration, even reanimating the dead. Revisionist history, it seems, can be practiced by just about anyone."

I haven't yet done anything like this, except for cropping, adjusting the color balance and/or brightness, and cropping photos. But there is a temptation, I admit, of using photos as a flexible medium, where you can create a reality as you would like it to be.

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