Jennifer in paradise: the story of the first Photoshopped image (2014)
For me, this is the most important point of the article:
And although, as Knoll is quick to point out, photos were being altered long ago in Soviet Russia, it was only Photoshop that democratised that ability. In a way Jennifer was the last person to sit on solid ground, gazing out into an infinitely fluid sea of zeros and ones, the last woman to inhabit a world where the camera never lied.
We now live in a world where anything we see, we hear, or speak is never taken on its value any more. You can have a picture of you standing next to Kim Kardashian and everybody will wonder if its actually you standing next to her - or did you manipulate the photo? You can watch a video and we now wonder if what we're seeing is actually real or not.
This photo was the last off ramp to a reality where nothing truly is what it seems anymore. I never thought or could imagine the world I currently reside in.
Oh my god. The demo video using the super-early version of Photoshop just taught me several things the lasso and magic wand tools can do in combo that I’ve never known, despite a lot of time using them over the years.
It is a photo that lends itself to photoshopping. Wide vista with distinct objects that do not interact. Solid borders between objects (horizon, green island on blue sky). Blocks of relatively homogenous texture. A near total lack of shadows, with the only one visible conveniently blurred by shallow water. And a subject exotic/remote enough that most people will not recognize any inconsistencies. It is so open to editing that I could believe it was built from scratch.
I remember being amazed by this 1986 documentary, where David Hockney uses a Quantel Paintbox to do digital painting & image manipulation:
A recent Reddit thread [1] has some pictures of the Pixar Image Computer mentioned in the article.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/1f3lzr...
Pity they don't have the "before" photo, so we can see what the photoshop effort added.
Related: "Lenna" - A pretty much de facto standard image for testing image editing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna (and a personal story behind the image: http://www.lenna.org/)
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