WARNING: This article contains whining and complaining about absolutely nothing of any significance to the world. If you don’t care: TOO BAD!
I love Photoshop, seriously, love it. My mother introduced it to me way back in the day (version 5.5), and through fooling around, I gradually learned more and more about it. Now, this doesn’t make me a good designer or a whiz with it, I’m an amateur, but I’m self-taught and I try to use it for good. I enjoy it, simple as that.
Enter centre stage: The MySpace Kids
Everyone who’s around my age remembers the craze that was MySpace. It was the big social network before Facebook took over. It was alright for its’ time I suppose, and garnered its popularity through music association. I mean, every teenage girl at the time declared that “music is my boyfriend”, and therefore this was the perfect setup medium. Add in the fact that you were granted an incredibly customizable profile, we saw sparkles and animated GIFs galore. It was painful to look at, but it had weaseled its way “in”.
It didn’t stop at scouring the internet for flashy crap though, they needed a new way to express themselves. This is when the world was introduced to “the MySpace poses”, various photo-graphical poses which would do a wonderful job at hiding what you actually look like, despite the face that it was a picture of you. There was just one more piece of icing on the cake to go with it – photo manipulation. I have a friend whom I think is very good at photomanips, I love seeing the things that she can come up with. Below are two good examples of what photo-manipulation is, by definition.
Image by Maggie Budziak.
(Unfortunately… neither of these are what I’m talking about.)
This is where my problem comes in. Somehow, somewhere, these kids had gotten ahold of photo-manipulation tools, but they weren’t using them to create interesting works of art like those two images above. No, no, they were abusing this wonderful program’s power, and instead, using it to create works of crap, that were showcased to everyone, bragged about, talked about how awesome they were. Ladies and gentlemen, this powerful tool of creation was being used to make… this:
WHAT. THE. BALLS. Seriously. I tried to parody it once. I took a picture of some plants in a park, up close, badly blurred, whipped out the colour tools and ta-da, I had the same quality type of image in less than a minute. Now, this probably doesn’t bother YOU, fine reader, nearly as much. To me, however, this is the equivalent of buying a Formula 1 racer… to make your grocery runs. It’s blasphemy, it’s pointless, it’s idiotic and WORST of all, it’s still popular.
I seriously can’t understand the appeal at all. There’s nothing that looks good about it, you just changed things to look a funny colour. Anyone can do that, and you’re not any more special for having done it. It’s a very powerful tool, and anyone who doesn’t realize the limitless potential at their fingertips when they use it.. simply isn’t trying hard enough. There are people who make their entire living off of working with that problem. Web designers, photographers, magazine editors, the list goes on…
With this being stated, I urge you all to never repeat such a thing. Changing the exposure on an image is too easy and it doesn’t make it look any better, it just changes things to a funny colour. Got a cracked copy of Photoshop on that system of yours? Good, now take a google’d photo of a hamster and manipulate it to look like the Pokémon, “Raticate”.
…and if you’re one of the people who produces images like the abysmal insult to creation, above, then a pox on you, fie, fie! Even the following took more work and looks more impressive, and at least this makes me laugh:
–Jeff “DanyLektro”