Adobe Photoshop has tweaked, brightened and enhanced our lives for 25 years. Adam Banks unmasks its many-layered reign.
It’s hard to believe there was no Photoshop before 1990. Its impact has since been magnified by the rise of digital photography and social media, and continues through an endless variety of rival products, but for a quarter of a century we’ve been living in the Photoshop age.
“Photoshop changed the ontology of the photograph,” said Caroline Bassett, professor of media and communications at the University of Sussex. “It revolutionised our sense of the relationship of the photographic image to the reality it remade. Before Photoshop, it was easier to believe a photograph captured the truth. After, we knew it was constructed. I think it’s the single most influential software package of the PC era.”
This judgement would have surprised University of Michigan postgraduate Thomas Knoll when he began coding a graphics tool on his Mac Plus in 1987. “Painting” programs existed for the Mac and other early PCs, but Knoll’s PhD was in computer vision. His brother John was working for George Lucas’ visual-effects company, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), and their father, Glenn, had a darkroom in their basement. Coming at bitmap editing from this fresh angle, they first sold their application bundled with newfangled scanners.
Before long, John had struck a deal with Adobe, which had just catapulted the Macintosh into the graphics business thanks to the Adobe LaserWriter printer. Priced at less than $1,000 at launch - half the price of Letraset’s ColorStudio software - Photoshop appealed to users who had latched on to the Mac as a way to get into cutting-edge creative work at a fraction of the cost. Previously, photo retouching had been performed by bureaux on six-figure workstations from companies such as Quantel and Scitex, charged at a going rate of £200 per hour. Now, in-house art staff could attempt it with Mac setups costing as little as £5,000 - and pros and amateurs alike could begin to invent new kinds of images.
Photographer and illustrator Ian McKinnell has used Photoshop since its days as a beta shared around ILM. “For the First year or two, I used it only for illustrating, but around that time there was a huge boom in photography, which paid far better, so I concentrated on that. There was so much dreadful retouching at First. I often worked in the background, fixing other people's disasters.”
Writer and photographer Martin Evening recalled how “more photographers started having a go at doing the work. It was a period of excitement for a few of us who were perhaps more nerdy and looked forward to seeing what could be done.” Not all attitudes were so positive: “There were photographers who saw it as contaminating pure, ‘real’ photography; there were advertising clients who had contracts with the high-end retouching houses.
A touch too much?
As Photoshop spread through the industry, retouching quickly became faster, cheaper and more extensive in its capabilities, offering creative directors the opportunity to tweak every shot. The effect was much greater - and more controversial - than the sum of its toolset.
“In the fashion industry, there was always a clique of influential designers who strongly influenced the look of models,” noted Evening. “Models had always tended to be undersized. Now, where a model or celebrity didn’t meet that idealised look, they could be sculpted into it.”
Interviewed by GQ in 2003, Kate Winslet asked why “women think in order to be adored they have to be thin”. Her own picture on the cover was then Photoshopped to make her look thinner. “They’ve reduced the size of my legs by about a third,” she later complained. In 2013, Lady Gaga was so offended by the retouching of her Glamour cover that she used the magazine’s own awards ceremony to attack “too perfect” images, assuring fans “I do not look like this when I wake up in the morning”.
Nor, though, did any published image of Greta Garbo or Hatshepsut reflect their subjects’ daily reality. Is Photoshop really to blame? In 2014, British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman explained to Lily Allen on BBC Radio 2: “Nobody really wants to see a real person looking like a real person on the cover of Vogue.”
In 2012, Jennifer Lawrence told Elle that, by Hollywood standards, she was “a fat actress” - a perception that highlighted the unachievable body shapes favoured by the industry. But asked if her20i4 Dior campaign had been Photoshopped, she made no apologies: “I love Photoshop more than anything in the world. Of course it’s Photoshop - people don’t look like that.” Her image was no more a representation of reality than the W'orks of the cubists in Christian Dior’s gallery a century earlier.
So, what's art and what's fakery? Margot Huysman, a picture researcher for the Daily Mirror, stresses the need to distinguish between types of content. “A big difference between news and commercial photos is that we wouldn’t airbrush news. We have a duty to show reality unaltered.” Even celebrity shots are treated with integrity. “As soon as you mess with someone’s skin tone or the size of their hips, you're in trouble. I'd never dream of retouching a picture that way.”
Photoshop, however, is adept at blurring lines. In 2005, Newsweek marked household-advice mogul Martha Stewart’s comeback from an insidertrading scandal with a cover that depicted her perkily pushing backstage curtains. When rival USA Today questioned its authenticity, Newsweek executives admitted it was a “photo illustration” based on nothing more than a headshot.
Such images have their place within a tradition of metaphorical illustration. When Newsweek ran a cover story on Barack Obama’s support for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights with a rainbow halo and the coverline “The first gay president”, nobody thought it meant Obama was gay, or that he had been canonised.
“I don’t think anyone would be fooled into thinking David Cameron’s face Photoshopped onto a raver’s body - I’ve actually done that! - is a real picture,” said Huysman. But the Stewart montage risked confusion. Readers might think she had posed for the photo as self-promotion. More subtly, the claim that she’d emerged “thinner” gained support from the image. “If there were people who were misled, that’s a problem,” Newsweek assistant managing editor Lynn Staley conceded.
Virtually reality
Steve Caplin, author of the How to Cheat in Photoshop series of books, has wrestled with similar concerns. One example involved the Sunday Telegraph, which wanted him to illustrate Gordon Brown holding a meeting with business leaders: “When it was published, I thought, ‘This looks too real.’ I should have put something in to make it more obviously an illustration.”
More typically, Caplin’s, seen by millions in newspapers and magazines, offers a brand of hyperreal conceptual mashup that’s inextricably linked with the emergence of image editing software: the British Isles carved from bacon; Prince Charles as a trashy action figure. His work began in 1987 with a video camera and a capture card for the Mac Plus. With usable digital photography a decade away, video grabbing was the first practical source of images.
When Margaret Thatcher was ousted from Downing Street, a Newsnight interview with her successor, John Major, provided the basis for an early commission. “I got his head from lots of angles; the low resolution didn’t matter,” recalled Caplin, who was using Image Studio, the precursor to Corel Painter. Photoshop’s support for colour was a step forward, but of little use in an age of black-and-white newspapers and monitors. What converted Caplin was that it crashed less.
By 1994, Caplin had regular photomontage cartoon strips in The Guardian and Punch. The arrival of Photoshop 3 changed the game again with independent layers. “It’s hard to express just how significant this was. You could do a montage and move things around afterwards. Previously, once you’d placed something in, you were stuck with it. It launched in the same week my son was born, and I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know which will have the bigger impact on my life.’ I think it was Photoshop 3,” he said, only half joking.
Caplin’s work also extends to advertising, where Photoshop provides the tools to stretch the rules on how far images of a product, or its effects, can be synthetically improved. Here the limits are policed by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). In 2011, chief executive Guy Parker told the BBC that a degree of retouching was acceptable, but that an ad would be pulled if it was “likely to mislead”. Defending one such ad, L’Oreal declined to reveal just how much Julia Roberts’ face had been Photoshopped. Self-defeatingly, it attributed her flawless complexion to “naturally healthy and glowing skin”.
Singer-songwriter Lorde in 2014 tweeted the unedited version of an image of herself that had been spread. “Remember flaws are okay,” she said. No doubt she was thinking about a feedback loop any teenager can confirm: we see flawless faces and bodies pictured; we buy products that promise to help match them; we take selfies and edit them closer to the ideal; we post them on social media; the cycle repeats.
Consumer apps turn Photoshop techniques into one-click effects that subtract the experimental creativity and reinforce popular norms. So, are we Photoshopping real life?
It’s an issue that goes well beyond the cosmetic. Eliot Higgins has blogged since 2012 on the Syrian civil war and related conflicts under the pseudonym Brown Moses. Pioneering a “citizen journalist” approach to image analysis, he monitors YouTube and social media for photos and footage of weapons on the ground, piecing together conclusions that have been cited by human-rights groups, MPs and journalists. Spotting fake images, he says, is easier than you think - but that’s not where the problems end.
“Most Photoshopped images from conflict zones tend to be fairly basic: flags or logos superimposed onto existing photos. A quick Google image search identifies the originals.” A widely circulated satellite picture supposedly showing the downing of flight MH17 over Ukraine turned out to be a composite of several images - harder to match automatically, but no challenge for online communities familiar with the source material. “That made a number of ‘experts’ and news channels look extremely foolish,” Higgins said.
Photoshop itself can be a powerful tool for revealing Photoshopping, using tonal adjustments to increase the visibility of cloning, changes in digital “noise4 and other telltale signs. But Higgins said this is rarely necessary, since manipulated images are “not as common as people think... you’re more likely to come across images from other events that have been reused.4 Again, reverse image search is the answer, but with “huge amounts of content [being posted], it will always be hard to get everyone checking every image they see”.
Twenty-five years on, Photoshop is still the first choice of graphics professionals. Increasingly, its main competition comes from specialised tools; Adobe’s own alternative, Lightroom, focuses on optimisation rather than manipulation. Although it’s now seen as less of a sin to rely on Photoshop to clean up an image, Caplin said some purists who felt using Photoshop was cheating now accept Lightroom as “just replacing darkroom techniques”.
Where more complex work is needed, it’s shifting back towards being an outsourced job, as offshore services undercut the cost of the photographer’s own time. The most skilled retouchers can still command high fees - but they’re earned with the same tools anyone can install for £8.57 per month. “Photo manipulation has become so everyday we don’t even remark on it,” said Caroline Bassett. “Yet we remain attached to the idea that photographs should tell the truth - even if we know they don’t.”
Policing the Photoshoppers
It’s an issue that goes well beyond the cosmetic. Eliot Higgins has blogged since 2012 on the Syrian civil war and related conflicts under the pseudonym Brown Moses. Pioneering a “citizen journalist” approach to image analysis, he monitors YouTube and social media for photos and footage of weapons on the ground, piecing together conclusions that have been cited by human-rights groups, MPs and journalists. Spotting fake images, he says, is easier than you think - but that’s not where the problems end.
“Most Photoshopped images from conflict zones tend to be fairly basic: flags or logos superimposed onto existing photos. A quick Google image search identifies the originals.” A widely circulated satellite picture supposedly showing the downing of flight MH17 over Ukraine turned out to be a composite of several images - harder to match automatically, but no challenge for online communities familiar with the source material. “That made a number of ‘experts’ and news channels look extremely foolish,” Higgins said.
Photoshop itself can be a powerful tool for revealing Photoshopping, using tonal adjustments to increase the visibility of cloning, changes in digital “noise4 and other telltale signs. But Higgins said this is rarely necessary, since manipulated images are “not as common as people think... you’re more likely to come across images from other events that have been reused.4 Again, reverse image search is the answer, but with “huge amounts of content [being posted], it will always be hard to get everyone checking every image they see”.
Twenty-five years on, Photoshop is still the first choice of graphics professionals. Increasingly, its main competition comes from specialised tools; Adobe’s own alternative, Lightroom, focuses on optimisation rather than manipulation. Although it’s now seen as less of a sin to rely on Photoshop to clean up an image, Caplin said some purists who felt using Photoshop was cheating now accept Lightroom as “just replacing darkroom techniques”.
Where more complex work is needed, it’s shifting back towards being an outsourced job, as offshore services undercut the cost of the photographer’s own time. The most skilled retouchers can still command high fees - but they’re earned with the same tools anyone can install for £8.57 per month. “Photo manipulation has become so everyday we don’t even remark on it,” said Caroline Bassett. “Yet we remain attached to the idea that photographs should tell the truth - even if we know they don’t.”