Examine these pixels...

Ok, so, this is something that has been bugging me for a while now, I assume you’ve all come across a picture on the internet whether stumbling or receiving an email from a friend. And this picture always makes you think something amazing is going on, whether it's the phenomenal timing the photographer had, or the complete ridiculousness of the event occurring in the image. But then, as if a big black rain cloud suddenly popped up over a parade, someone needs to make a comment deeming such image fake or Photoshopped.

And of course, these illusive and mysterious commentators feel the need to make themselves seem professional, stating they examined the pixels and so on and so forth. Something that immediately seems to damn any photo it’s said about, and at this point, that’s is just about every photo ever loaded onto the Internet. So here is my issue with this statement that everyone and their mothers uncle seems to throw around on the Internet. One, if the person that is doing the Photoshop is good enough that you cant tell its a Photoshop just by looking at it, then chances are they edited the image in a large file size. What does this mean? Well personally, I shoot most of my photographs with a Canon 40D, and when I edit in CS4 I edit at the largest file size I can, this means that at a resolution of 72 dpi my image is 3888×2592, and that’s simply if I shoot in Jpeg. That’s a lot of pixels to go through in order to determine whether an image is fake or real.

Now as most of you may have experienced, loading an image up onto the internet either for Facebook or Myspace, or any other system, you can’t exactly load a gigantic image, you need to size it down, usually to within a 4 or 5 MBs and into a jpeg or a png format. Now being one that has done a decent amount of editing to an image before, each edit adds a lot of data to an image file. Layers upon layers of this and that and so on and so forth, and then those layers need to be flattened into one layer and then that image needs to be resized, normally smaller. Now every one has a different workflow, but this seems to be that standard at my school (By the way, I feel I should mention, that when the FBI needs to authenticate whether a photo is real or not, they call a Professor who teaches at my institute.) so I can’t imagine it being terribly different throughout the rest of the educated population.

I guess the main point of me rambling on and on about this process is that in the end, when the editor resizes the image before uploading it on, the software normally bases its pixel layout based on the colors and contrast of the image, so each time you resize, you change where the pixels are. Unless you’re combining images and the resolutions between them are vastly different, there is no evidence placed solely in the pixels that says when an image is shopped. It takes training to see a Photoshopped image, at least when its done properly, and even if it’s not done properly you don’t need to examine the pixels to see that, 9 times out of 10, you can just look at the image and see that something has been added or changed. So please, take your pixel examining bullshit, and go somewhere else.

Oh, and can anyone tell me if the image at the beginning of this post is Photoshopped or not? I mean it looks legit, doesn’t it?

Observations of an artistic community...

So I've been working with a group of students for the past 4 months now, helping my professor show them the essential information they will need to know in order to survive in this new digital world. It's been both exciting and eye opening, we never really think about what our opinions have on our peers work and this experience has really shown me that the words we use and the way we express our thoughts, especially in relevance to something that someone has created, can have a truly deep impact. That being said, they can also have no impact at all. So which is better? In our world today, life is full of extremes, there no longer is a moderate, there is action or no action, democrat or republican, black or white. the idea of a gray is no longer accepted as it once was, but I digress, and have already lost my way...

I mention the impact we have on other people because I find myself suddenly fascinated with the idea of coherence and intent. As artists, where do we intend to venture with our work? As a college student, I see people simply finish work for their grade all the time, and I also see people put their heart and soul into a piece of work like they have time and time again and produce something that is a true reflection of who they are. And the truly ironic part of all this? The person that takes another step and makes their work personal, always makes something better than the person that shoots simply for a grade.

As I write this I am sitting here working on an image I shot over my holiday break, pandora radio is whirring away in the background, and I find myself truly satisfied with a piece of work for once. It's been a while since I've worked on a piece of personal work so to finally sit down and work on something that is only for me is a wonderful breathe of fresh air from my usual advertising work. Does that mean that this work will inherently be better than any of my advertising work? Possibly. But it does lead me to ask the intrinsic question of what my art is, what is the essence of my work?

I guess that's something for all of us to think about. What makes our work ours, if we just make work for a grade or money or that satisfying pat on the head, does that not defeat the purpose of making work? I say yes it does. Everything we make at any point in our lives, should be for the continuation and growth of our work. And thus ourselves.

Just for a little fun, I'll upload the shot I'm working on right now, it's still being edited, so I'll just have to come back and upload it again when it's all done.