Is Photoshop Manufacturing Art

Tyler Jordan
tj249713@ohio.edu

We live in a society where fake content is everywhere. Whether it be fake news, fake information, or fake photos, I’m sure we’ve all come across something that seemed too good to be true. However, its surprising to see how prevalent and easy it is for photographers to lie with the use of Photoshop editing. I myself have used Photoshop numerous times for digital art and for editing my photos, so I’m familiar with just how useful of a tool Photoshop can be for enhancing photos into almost whatever they were intended be. And while I understand wanting to make the most out of picture, I think there’s a thin between “just enhancing a photo” and manipulating a photo for the sake of lying.

Photo by webneel.com

Manufactured Photography

            Photoshop is one the most commonly used software for photo editing and it’s also fairly easy to obtain. The current version of Photoshop allows newcomers to use the software for up 30 days before having to pay for it. And even when it is time to pay up, adobe currently offers a $10 monthly plan that gives you full access to Photoshop. There’s also mobile versions of Photoshop, and similar apps, that allow photo editing. The problem with having such easy access to this software is that it can allow just about anyone to edit a regular photo into a professional looking one. Before I had a camera, I took a lot of photos on my phone and would use a picture enhancing app to make them look better. I recently compared some the photos from my HD camera to the phone edited ones I had, and I was astonished to see how similar in quality the two groups of photos looked. It’s dangerous to think that how watered down and disingenuous professional photography could become because of software like these. This article shows off a new feature Photoshop has called Sky Replacement where it allows people the ability to edit skies to look clearer, different colored, or basically whatever the editor wants it to look like. This can easily damage the integrity and professionalism of photography because, basically all this feature is doing is allowing creators to make water ever kind of sky they desire without any creative action in the photographing process. So, while sure it could be a good tool for editors trying to get everything to look right in a photo, it makes the photo unauthentic because a part of it is fake.

Staging Reality 

There’s also the problem of how Photoshop can falsely affect the reader’s interpretation of the picture. This article shows how some fashion editors edit unhealthily thin models to look better. Practices like these have already proven to create a false sense of reality in women to think that this form of skinniness is possible, but it’s disgusting to think that even though some of these editors are aware of this unhealthy figure, they still doctor it up and put out this false image for people to believe is true.