Jake of the Web

Bad uses of Photoshop in ads, news stories and even Google Earth. Things that are just too perfect - or too weird - to be real, and have clearly been digitally manipulated:

- Movie covers with faces awkwardly plastered onto bodies, with actors ultimately striking impossible poses:


- The 'Home for Sale' ad where the only green portion of the lawn has been copied and digitally spread all over the front yard:


- The Google Earth image where a patch of trees has clearly been copied and duplicated to cover up... something...


- Models with curiously long or short limbs, missing jaws(!) or limbs simply jutting out of the incorrect part of their body:


- Famous faces pasted onto the packaging of foreign products:
"I'm Jennifer Aniston, and I approve these pantyhose."


- Not surprisingly, there are a lot of sultry-looking women online and in magazines who have been 'slenderized' using photo manipulation. Distortion of the background makes it painfully clear there is some dishonesty going on here.



- Even an Iranian press release showing the firing of missiles had been Photoshopped to include more missiles in a simultaneous launch than were really there:

Chuck Heston mini-Photoshop Disasters

Although you have undoubtedly seen a photomosaic before, you may not know what one is. A photomosaic is a picture made up of many smaller images. One of the movie posters for The Truman Show is a prime example of this:



There is software out there that enables you to create your own Photomosaic:

Photomosaic maker – Perhaps the easiest to use by virtue of gathering other people's images for you, 'Photomosaic Maker' collects pictures from Flickr.com and forms them into a mosaic of any image you upload.
Photomosaic Maker

A more intense (but therefore with more customizable results) is the downloadable photomosaic maker 'Andreamosaic'. Andreamosaic allows you to use your own pictures (select a folder or folders on your hard drive) to create the tiles of the mosaic.
Andreamosaic allows a lot more customization of the end result (number of tiles, what pictures to use, how often a picture can be reused, etc) but is relatively processor-intensive and can take some time.
Andrea Mosaic