Photoshop: 1. a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. It was originally created in 1987 by Thomas and John Knoll. 3. A digital means to arrive at the fake version of something which was once real, meaningful. 2. An insidious computer virus which has remade our natural world into a trashy pornographic online smut mag. Before 'meme' was a word, Americans were frustrated by newly-minted wealth which scattered work-a-holic Japanese travelers abroad to consume foreign cultures with relish through the lens of Nikon cameras. Standing upon the cliffs of Moher or the Grand Canyon incubated the fledgling meme precept we used to call a stereotype. This meme baby instantly became it's own irritating topic of ridicule. The vista was being populated, even blocked by tourists with (sometimes several) big expensive film cameras. Well, perhaps most of the outrage was merely misplaced jealousy. These visiting tourists had some really swell camera gear, and we broke families chose between lunch and a roll of Kodachrome. So absolute was this new stereotypical "Japanese Tourist", that people would vocally chastise only foreign tourists with cameras, placing selectively [racist] signs forbidding cameras as nuisance. This meme-ish nostalgic look-back is laughable by today's standards of public conduct. Suffice to say those bygone signs of an SLR with a red line through it are desperately welcome today -- But of course it is the phone we'd prefer to cross out. Our thrifty American answer to ray-gun sized camera envy c. 1979-80, was to reinvent the pocket camera, and later the disposable; although discretion was not an American affect abroad. Today... Seemingly before the image is even captured, the digital film begins to molt into the vulgar pornography of it's manipulated result. Today the digital Capture perfects our experience well before we even see the screen. Genius Adobe Gene-editing now reduces sacred places, museums, and libraries into another organism. A fake place, a plastic version of an event we'd not actually seen, because we were way busy taking bad pix. In 1980, every monument and museum I can think of strictly forbade professional cameras, and this continued through 2010ish for any music Venue. The justification was initially to sell the postcard, and the book as you'd exit through the gift shop. A concert venue hires pros to capture an event for media, advertising, and for resale. Today everyone carries nearly as much fire-power in their pocket, and the phone is seemingly unrestricted. The Phone is a bane, no doubt, as are its unwitting users. The tiny screen is every event's inevitable destiny, as mega-peta-bytes of our plastic world softly melt into an ocean of unsearchable digital film stock. The formula we use to fix the image is where the world goes rogue. The event is lost to digital, because busy snapping fingers, ignore the place entirely and nobody saw it. Later in the look-back, edits are either passable or sharable, or are swiped away. Billions and billions of images per hour fall from the cutting table. Our cancer of editing our natural world into a newer, better, zippy, colorized, contrasty version is a bit Like dolling up for a sex film. There is the moment when mere nudity seems a thrill, pretty, soft, inevitable -- And with a whiff comes the let-down... A freshly faded fantasy leaves us feeling dirty, ill at ease. Perhaps the very Britannica definition of porn possesses this nuance shift from lust to repulsion, from nude to naked. As companions go, the real thing is far more meaningful, even preferred with all of it's flaws, to one's quality time alone with a fake, the blow-up doll. Inadequate, unfeeling, incapable of seeing, and yet humans seem unable to leave that damn thing alone. Photoshop is of course apolitical -- We are all liberals here; abusing our 'liberal' application of filters to everything we capture -- Which means that the thing itself will never taste as good as the picture had promised. Unretouched could never be as good as the thing in the magazine. Nothing will ever feel as real as that edit appeared. And IT will inevitably leave us deflated, wondering why we no longer feel anything at all. Without deliberation... when it becomes too easy and all the film is free, all images lose their meaning, their value. If it is true that, "You can't take it with you", Then why are we taking so many fucking pictures? LONESOME? There was a short scene in the famous road trip film "Y Tu Mama Tambien" [directed by Alfonso Cuarón] where the heroine explains to the adolescents that if they touch that thing too much, they will always let a woman down. ...An important distinction between 'Well-Practiced" and "practicing", which any coach will attest reflects upon just how one should do something correctly. Back-stage actors in makeup look a bit doll like, and silly, but everyone is color corrected today, thanks to photo-shop. Salt and Tabasco may have replaced tasteless protestant diets, coating & concealing a palette which yearned for excitement. But blasé, can only be concealed so long, gathered in a bow, doused in hot-sauce, sugar, and duck-fat -- But a shit-sandwich is still shit, with or without a ribbon tied around it's buns. What is remarkable is how insidiously Photoshop snuck into our formerly beautiful world and fucked it all up. For now -- Today, what remains, (much like the chemistry of comida), is the new version, an alternate reality. The snazzy, brushed-up sunset version of everything has trained us to only perceive, and eventually 'like' the online version. For a million billion bygone real things, we have but one "Online Persona" -- who has betrayed the person who we'd pulled a blanket over. A thing is exactly that, but the new thing we have substituted betrays the thing itself. Consider a landscape, full of fluffy clouds, anchored with orange glows, strong shadows, contrasts sweeping from peaked white to deep rich earth tones. What does it look like?, smell like?, feel like? Have you ever wondered how many of those revved-up images at the art fair get sold? How many bedazzled sky-scapes, sea-scapes, and landscapes go home with patrons just to compliment their sofa cushions? That Landscape is the new reference, and after it, one stops looking at the scenery. Countless unnumbered duplicates are generated with a strong tendency towards the artificial. Deep Fakes of our natural world accompany us home, and everywhere else. Have you ever taken a picture of a sunset, and then buried it back into your pocket, because the image didn't reveal the real experience? It is not your cellphone camera which needs to be upgraded, nor it's memory expanded... This falsity may go a long way to learning why we only see grainy black and whites of Space Aliens, and UFOs. Perhaps it is because some things escape us, simply because they refuse to be captured. They do not fit in that tiny box, nor do they belong in your pocket. Their capture eludes us simply because it was not meant to be. Atoms ducking and dodging our considered observation through twin slots. Even the atoms know we are infantile, weak, and insecure. Quantum Mechanics Mystery HERE As often as our version seems an established fact, our observation is frequently incorrect. How many times have you rented the headset, audio guide at some cultural attraction and followed along with a suave narrator, who carried you gracefully through a poignant event in time, articulating relevant cultural and historical context? Did you learn something new and compelling? And can we now get a show of hands for how often your moment was destroyed by someone nonchalantly ignoring every decorum, snapping pictures of literally everything, capturing even the little white placard labels as if for later review, with ZERO intention of ever revisiting this place, the exhibit, or even their tiny phone pix? No deliberation, no images are well considered, nothing captured resembles the place. Me, even with a great camera, would generally leave the place with a post-card, because I was humble enough to acknowledge that I didn't get that shot right. Today, It seems that in order to "get one's money's-worth, we need to cram and confine every actual moment digitally into the tiny device in our pocket like stuffing a genie back in the bottle or a rabbit back into it's hat. Here we forget that the magic trick was actually to reveal the genie and the rabbit, and not to make them disappear. Our cultural conflict is far larger than our strange penchant to stab at the air with ones zoom lens. To "Shoot" everyone with our ray-gun. As Susan Sontag used to call it, that phallus of the camera's lens, is still merely a masculine construct for compensation. Today, everyone is stealing souls as images, experiences, time, and every single moment, even brunch is memorialized, and then disappears without enjoyment of the actual monument. The actual cultural attraction is being felt-up, groped with 46 megapixels, whilst being wholly ignored. The statue, the model, is being prodded, molested, captured, doctored, and re-shared endlessly with nobody in particular, and then forgotten. Our obsession with color corrected photographs becomes a message in a bottle, floating amidst billions of others, clanking and yearning for someone to uncork our trivial moment, read it's message, and release the genie. Our moment is lost, Our moments crashed and burned, and their delicate value dissolves with a click! The cultural attraction photobombed, raped, and lay in ruin, because nobody can just go to the damned museum, and enjoy the art. Lest we mention Rock Concerts, Restaurants, Bars, and even the Lyric Opera. Last week I sat for a fresh new Shakespeare Production, and 20 minutes into the show, two ladies entered glowing cell phones to their ears, one told the person on the other end to hold on while she, "got dis picture..." before sharing it, and then sitting down to continue overshare more about herself with everyone in attendance. It was an uncanny performance art event -- A flash mob of two. The play irreparably disrupted. Shaken actors continued their dialog morphed with a soupy amalgam of competing storylines. Concentration forever corrupted for enraged patrons. The first act was trashed, reverse Photo-bombed by uncouth slobs. At intermission we were re-seated, far away from them.. but it wasn't until an actor paused the show, before they were alas asked to leave, once again disturbing everyone. Then came uncanny, but therapeutic applause for their exit. So the question which begs to be asked of our modern condition is, If a tree falls in the forest... Does anything actually happen, IF it is not Posted on TikTok? Does a thing actually happen if it is not documented, photographed, edited, shared, and properly fucked [up] by "photos" Photoshop and phone calls. In any case it is important to remember that a digital image capture actually is NOT a Photograph. My pro photographer friends unwind on weekends and vacation days with a real film camera, to shake off the bad juju of countless hours in "POST" [production]. When the thing does so much for you, it is comforting, and even therapeutic, when something makes you think, and perhaps you do it yourself. The retouched GIF of every experience from Shopping, to Menus, is a portion shrink-wrapped so that people can harvest experiences without contact. Perhaps it began at the video arcade when our three lives cost a quarter, and then four quarters, and... The appeal of never dying became so strong, that having unlimited lives, and unlimited image capture promised us we'd never make a mistake again. Rather, Photoshop promised, even shitty photographers would be cool. How much spare-time would an adolescent bank if each video game life cost a hundred bucks? Imagine the promise to recover the highlights, and then the lowlights, to fix the color, fill in the flaws, remove hair, add hair, lift the chin, fuller breasts, all of which means we are indominable, and we will never die. Endless lives and everything is free at ISO 30,000 right? Does our Sun even set without being photographed? Reality notwithstanding... Does the ipso-facto event of our sun setting even happen without being photographed, retouched, and reshared, and then subsequently liked? Does a Rembrandt actually hang on a museum wall, or should a Rodin stand in a piazza? Could we not sub in fakes everywhere, which are easier to capture. Perhaps a cardboard cutout David that we can manipulate for just the right angle and shadow? Could we wander aimlessly through a forest smelling and touching the bark, and moss, or do we need to capture it, and doctor it up in order to process the moment. Your phone and mine make irrelevant the experience of actually visiting a place, if we never look up from them. From the right angle, with the perfect filter, posted by the beautiful people -- The simulated forest is perhaps all that we need, because the actual one is way too 2-D, and Boring. Photoshop is complicit for the crime of dissolving concrete experiences in favor of the far more pleasing retouched, airbrushed, blemish-free version of them. Food Pictures, Fashion, Automobiles, Landscapes, all look better on your screen. Misery lurks within that chasm between the thing we've retouched and the real version. Clouds morph into foamy mousse. Food becomes waxy, torched, painted, colorized, and humiliated. Faces, and asses are flawlessly firmed, and softened into brioche before they are ready for a bow and some daylight. I have never eaten fast food which looks as appetizing as the photo, and so I pack a sandwich. It used to be that people got spruced up for dinner, a date, or the disco, but today it's done just for the pictures... you have become a paparazzi of one. Wait before you slam the door!... I'm only saying that the guy on the left may be a blast to chat with over dinner -- But If the guy on the right came by for BBQ, I would stand petrified at the threshold. Before dinner, if this horror-show / "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" version of Clooney blinks, I will certainly have a stroke right there in the doorway. ![]() OK, so for the kids... real truth is actually a fucking pencil. Pencils (a matriculation from crayons), are where one could begin to express themself. Of course you could start with charcoal, merely the soft naked art-school fuck-buddy of the pencil -- But both serve properly as your VIP ticket to that funky rave we call human expression. Here is where you'd likely begin with a fresh sheet of paper if you were to understand your 'ID', express yourself, and perhaps save thousands in therapy, breaking the cycle of this plastic life. You cannot begin to draw with a digital pencil, Stylus, digital pen, brush, raster editor etc... until you begin to feel, and work with the real thing. History will remember bad faith actors disgraced and pulverized under the tumble of this steamroller of disingenuity whilst a rickety combine separates the chaff of false morality from the textured wheat of the real thing. History will also recall the great masters, who'd managed to raise a pencil to paper earnestly striving to express themselves without the corruption of an iPad, or Photoshop. Perhaps this is why an actual art museum is so therapeutic, in the still morning before the crowd of phones come in. Generally we go there as we would a Cathedral, to revel in the awe-inspiring bliss of analog solitude. I've yet to visit a museum where 'Photoshop' was the main exhibit, and I've seen some strange shit. In fact, it seems that Curators & Docents deplore retouching. The chasm between analog sketchbooks, and those who'd cut their teeth on a tablet "Sketchpad", is critical to understanding the Photoshop effect. The digital sketchpad closes shapes, shades the top lip, renders the shadows, imparting a "3D Effect", and forging a thing until the thing is cooked... But the thing is not your thing, nor did you actually make it. Just as never having rolled a Patterson tank full of wet silver dust, will disqualify you from the basic understanding of capturing a photo. It is a false premise to state that things have changed... but they are for certain less authentic in photoshop. Creation of a thing requires mistakes, & to understand a thing requires touching it, not merely retouching it. A fresh sheet of paper, or a Canvas, or a roll of film promises plenty of margin for error, and perhaps a cost consequence for do-overs. Skill; increases with the consequence of no do-overs. This was true for video games, and it is true for graphic arts. The physics of light are the essence of photography, and the light and shade of a pencil upon paper is the rote required to learn to sketch. Paint is damn tough to lift back up off the canvas, or to swap layers, and create a clone... A program called sketchbook or sketchpad is a simulacrum of sketching, but it is NOT a sketch-pad, those are NOT pens, NOT Brushes, and That stylus is NOT a Pencil. Ce n'est Pas Un Crayon ![]() How to Mix and Develop Your Film with Coffee Instead of photoshop. To make 1 liter (roughly 4 cups) of Caffenol film Developer:
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