Tag: Photoshop

The New Media Center is getting busy as we head into the second half of the semester, and a good number of our patrons are using Photoshop. The average user might use it to touch up a photo, add text, or do some graphic design work.

But then there are the extreme outlier users like Adam Kennedy. Adam uses Photoshop to transform photos of rusty fire hydrants into stunning planetary landscapes. It’s such an out-of-the-box, unusual idea, but it works, and it looks great. This is a terrific example of photomanipulation being pushed beyond what you’d expect. There’s also something to say about the re-appropriation of urban decay to create new worlds, etc., but we’ll leave that to the critics.

The artist has published more on his personal website and is currently seeking crowd funding to continue this project. In any event, it should serve as inspiration for people working on end-of-semester Photoshop projects. Yes, you can make something as awesome as this with the right tools.

For as long as we’ve trusted the authenticity of photography, it seems like, naturally, we’ve wanted to mess around with photos too. Now it seems like this urge his been around for generations – in this case, a whole century before we started Photoshopping mustaches onto people’s faces. Wired recently uncovered a collection of unusual postcards from the turn of the 20th century showing evidence of some of the first photo manipulation… though it appears that back in the 1900s, it was primarily used to make pictures of giant chickens and potatoes.

In any event, these pictures from the Tall Tale Postcards group and the Wisconsin Historical Society are a neat look back at our obsession with photographic fakery. If you want to take a leap into photo editing with modern technology (and presumably beyond pictures of livestock), the computers at the New Media Center are now equipped with Photoshop CS6.