blooper

All posts tagged blooper

Having been in the graphic business for over two decades, I look at things differently than your average guy would, I guess.
And I’ve seen quite a few weird and bad Photoshop jobs pass my desk.
Sometimes you wonder “but… but… HOW??? WHAT were they thinking??” Also sometimes you look at something and you simply KNOW there’s something odd, but you can’t really put your finger on it, because it’s not all THAT clear from the start.

Yesterday I was flying from Denpasar to Manila, a 4 hour flight. Cebu Pacific (excellent company, I’ve flown with them many many times!) has their own in-flight magazine, as many carriers do, and of course there’s plenty of advertising in it. I finished my book, so I had plenty of time to scrupulously go through the whole magazine. And really, when you look at things closely, there’s a surprising amount of really shitty Photoshop work out there.

There was one with a swimming pool, where people and chairs were copy-pasted in, with reflections and shadows in every which (wrong) way, dwarfs and giants living harmoniously together, there were really REALLY bad masking jobs, and so on.
I picked out one of many for you that caught my eye specifically.

This one, supposedly a very upscale real estate company, hired one of Philippines’ most famous models to pose in their imagery. Look how she’s holding on tight with one hand on the railing of the speed boat and with the other hand on the glass of wine.
Oh, but hang on…

Real estate advertisement

Real estate advertisement, copyright belongs to the respective owners.
Snapshot of the advertisement page in Cebu Pacific Air’s in-flight magazine.

Details of the real estate advertisement

Details of the real estate advertisement

So basically every element in this adverts is copy-pasted to make this composite of images. And it’s done badly.

I kept on snickering when I paged through the magazine. The people sitting next to me probably thought I was pretty weird 😀

Something completely different from Norway. One of those impulse posts, I guess you could call it.
I’m not one of those groupies who’s scouring the net and the movies for any of those Photoshop bloopers that they haven’t been able to cover up properly, or one of those scenes where they do something physically impossible (duh?? 😀 ).
But this afternoon I was going through the local cinema’s offer of new movies. I wanted to go see a movie. I had a few possible ones that I’d like to see. I heard a lot about the Hunger Games, and so I checked a quick synopsis from the cinema’s home page. It was accompanied by this picture (of course the red circles and the enlargements weren’t there, I put them there to show where to look 😉 ):

The Hunger Games

Still from the Hunger Games starring Jennifer Lawrence. Image courtesy Color Force / Larger Than Life Productions / Lionsgate / Ludas Productions

Pretty young lady, Jennifer Lawrence, isn’t she? Cool picture, too. But when you’re done looking at her, go ahead and follow the arrow along her left arm to her hand and her hand itself.
Now… I’m not an archer, I’ve done it a couple of times, but I don’t know anything about it. It could just be that this is some sort of Robin Hood technique that I’m not familiar with, but that arrow is resting on her wrist and in an angle like that it will swerve to the left and miss target, if the tail of the arrow doesn’t bump the hand and topple over. Or maybe the sixth finger on her hand is doing all the correcting there… Who knows…?

So is this one of those Photoshop bloopers? Or has she perfected the archery so much that you can actually shoot like this? Or is she hoping that that stretched out finger, and the extra finger, will force-point the arrow in the right direction?

Comments, suggestions and explanations welcome 😉

So there I was, paging through the winners of the 2008 National Geographic photography contest and when I came across this one I started wondering…

National Geographic Places winner

National Geographic Places winner

Something just wasn’t right, but it took me a while to put my finger on it. And then it struck me: the reflection is not a reflection. The clouds continue in the water, they don’t reflect in the water!

Here’s a reputable institute like National Geographic, organizing a yearly reputable Photography contest with reputable photographers as participants and judges. And they allow a photograph made in Photoshop to win a category? How wrong is that really?

The photographer just shot a picture of a sky (I hope, at least, pictures of a sky are so easy to come by through other means these days, I surely hope he won’t be caught on both cheating AND copyright infringement…) and a picture of some water with some boats on it and combined them in Photoshop.
It’s a gorgeous image, you have to give him that, but National Geographic should never have allowed this to go through in this category. As per their rules for entry:

Minor burning, dodging and/or color correction is acceptable. Hand tinting is acceptable, as is cropping. Fish-eye lenses are acceptable. High dynamic range images (HDRI) and stitched panoramas are acceptable only if the combined parts are all made around the same time. For more information, please read Director of Photography David Griffin’s comments on image manipulation. Any changes to the original Photograph not itemized here are unacceptable and will render the Photograph ineligible for a prize.

I stumbled across a great blog called Photoshop Disasters. Its writer was supplied with a hilarious image by one of its readers and I just have to put it here (image courtesy of Photoshop Disasters, copyright with the magazine it was published in, although one can wonder if one should be proud of that 😀 )

Image as found on the blog Photoshop Disasters, source magazine unknown

Image as found on the blog Photoshop Disasters, source magazine unknown

So here we are, us photographers. Trying our very, very best to produce a great image for our clients.
Sure, we all know that all images we see are edited to some extend. I’m sure everyone’s familiar with Dove’s viral from YouTube (by Tim Piper / Ogilvy), which is a quick peek behind the scenes of what’s really going on in the advertising world.
And also in the image shown above you can clearly see that for example the legs have been extended.
But the whole crew of designers and editors who let this image pass must’ve been either drunk or mass-hypnotized, because this is seriously one of the biggest bloopers I’ve seen in my graphic career. And I’ve seen a good number of them…