‘Photoshopping’ – A Contemporary Style of Art

'Photoshopping’ is a common slang for photo manipulation and the term originated from the popular graphics-editing program known as Adobe Photoshop.

Photo manipulation has been around for a very long time but with the advent of sophisticated digital imaging products such as digital cameras, powerful personal computers and sophisticated photo-editing software, photo manipulation has become a common practice. Due to the advancement of digital imaging hardware and software, the manipulation of photos have become a much easier and efficient procedure and fake photos are becoming more difficult to detect.

The following YouTube shows some great examples of digital photo manipulation and retouching produced by Rodrigo Bressane.

'Photoshopping’ is a common term used to describe digital photo manipulation and it has become a contemporary style of art. A perfect demonstration of this new style of art is Photoshop Tennis where a pair of artists start of with one original photo between the two of them and they take turns manipulating it to produce a new meaning. This game is sometimes referred to as Photoshop Pong and Photoshop Battle as it follows a similar concept to the ‘DJ battle’ except the game is played by editing and remixing images. Photoshop tennis initiated during the late 1990s and early 2000 on graphic related internet forums.

Here is a great example of a Photoshop Tennis game. It was a battle between Danielle Russel and LJ Jun.

In my opinion, digital photo manipulation is a practice to craft illusion and deception, which makes it very difficult to distinguish which photos or artworks are authentic. But the power of digital imaging has become a contemporary style of art that has allowed us to further express ourselves to the world.