It's that time of year again— time for everybody to whip out their copies of Photoshop and create lots of fakes to try and fool people for the day. Witness what the fine folks at Google have announced, for example.

So we're making this an open thread: what are the best made up photos that you've seen today? Please include links.

Okay, so it lists at $3000. And I might have a hard time justifying it. But damn it, I want one.

From Scott McNulty at The Unoffical Apple Weblog:

Wacom Cintiq 21UX 21 inch pen display

I can't draw a straight line, or a circle, and most of what I do on my Powerbook involves text (i.e. writing and coding), so I really can't think of a compelling reason for me to plunk down $2500 bucks (or so) on the new Wacom Cintiq 21UX. That being said, this product looks awesome. Imagine a high quality flat screen monitor met a Wacom tablet in a bar one night. They strike up a conversation, and get along famously. One thing leads to another and 9 months later the Wacom Cintiq 21UX is born.

The resolution clocks in at 1600x1200 with a resolution of 5,080 lpi. The Cintiq also comes with a new Grip pen for writing on the screen with tilt sensitivity and it even comes with three nib styles for a variety of feels.

At some point, I'll test it out and let you know how it works. Better, I'll also get some traditional pen & ink artists to try it and tell me what they think.

Bruce Sterling, fellow SF writer and all around gadfly, has embarked on a neat little project creating pictures from the future, in The Futures Lab at Art Center College of Design. Our guiding principle: 2010 has to seem at least as weird to 2005 as 2005 would seem to people in 2000.

Go to the link and look around at the entries.

Via Cory at BoingBoing, Howard Rheingold gives us this: Jeremy Bailenson and Shanto Iyengar at Stanford University have made a startling and potentially frightening discovery about the power of graphical manipulation to persuade people.

In a study conducted one week before the 2004 presidential election, a representative sample answered a series of survey questions about John Kerry and George Bush, including their vote intention.

The study consisted of three groups of respondents: one had their own photograph morphed into a picture of Bush, the second had their photograph morphed into a picture of Kerry, and the third was given un-morphed photographs of the two candidates.

The results demonstrated that respondents were significantly more likely to vote for the candidate with whom their face had been morphed (for both Bush and Kerry). This effect was stronger for people who did not have strong party affiliations (i.e., independent voters) than for strong partisans.

In summary, one week before the presidential election, respondents' vote choice was swayed by a simple morphed photograph. In politics, as in life, birds of a feather flock together.

Yeesh. If this is true, the implications are staggering. Can you imagine what this will do to advertising? Looker, here we come…

Toronto Crime Stoppers is posting crime scene photos in which victim(s) and perpetrator(s) have been digitally removed. The batch of images linked here once depicted acts of violent sexual abuse of a nine-year-old girl, but now contain only inanimate objects — a sofa, a bed, a wall, a water fountain. They're published online with a public request that anyone who recognizes the site contact authorities. Investigators are hoping crime-scene photographs will jog someone's memory and assist police in locating the hotel or area where the child exploitation occurred.

Via Xeni at BoingBoing.

Mok3 today introduced its Perspective Clone Brush plug-in for Photoshop— you can use it to rapidly clone areas in an image with automatic correction for 3D perspective. In addition to saving countless hours of painting or manual retouching, the Perspective Clone Brush also features advanced capabilities to perform its cloning operation with simultaneous correction for differences in lighting and scale in the image.



Note these samples of Fanuiel Hall, before and after.

I'd certainly like to try it out, but, you guessed it, Windows only at the moment. If anybody can try it out, let us know what you think in the comments section.

In a past life, I hosted the NetLaw Special Interest Group for the World Wide Web Artists Consortium. This was back in the days when nobody knew about the intersection of the net and the law, short of Sandra Bullock movies, and back when I got a crash course by being a plaintiff in ACLU v. Reno... before it became trendy.

And yet, oddly enough, there's been little overlap in law and Photoshop. To wit, I've been looking for legal fraud facilitated by Photoshop, and I've found surprisingly little. I've been waiting for some lawyer to suggest that photographic evidence should be thrown out of court, simply because it's too easy to creat undetectable fakes; but so far, I don't know of any such cases.

So I'm throwing it open to the readers. Heard of any such cases? Replies in comments, please.

Man, that's a lot of snow. But if you play with the contrast and squint really hard, I think you can see Bigfoot.

So I hear that Google has a free image editing program called Picasa that's supposed to be moderately cool, and you sure can't beat the price. The problem is that it only runs on Windows machines, and running it on Virtual PC isn't quite a fair test. So I turn to you, faithful readers.

Anybody out there tried this thing? Post your impressions in the comment section.

You weren't doing anything this weekend anyway, were you?

Faithful reader Saul Rosenbaum (and guru over at flash.weblogsinc.com) points us to http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2004/12/02/antialiasing/ which gives us many useful tips on tweaking text vertically.

Yep, another one in our occasional "other tools of the trade" section, and this one you can get at your local supermarket. Lightbulbs.

If you're using soft white lights in your home or office— or worse, fluorescent lights— you're going to get some serious color shifts between what you expect and what you get. Changing the lightbulbs, even just one or two, can make a huge improvement.

I've been using the GE Reveal bulbs and I've been quite happy. They give a very natural light, and seem to give very crisp colors, and cost little more than your regular bulbs. Try it out.

The good folks at ThinkSecret posted these rumors about Photoshop CS 2.0:

Among the new features arriving in the next and ninth version of Photoshop, code-named Space Monkey, will be the ability to scale placed bit-mapped and vector files losslessly, including the ability to edit the original and have Photoshop update the file; an object-based user interface that will enable, for example, the ability to select multiple layers and perform manipulations across all of them at the same time; Editable Filters, allowing filters to update when filtered content is adjusted; HDR support; a customizable user interface; and a WYSIWYG Font menu.

Photoshop CS 2.0 will not feature 64-bit support, but lays the groundwork for that support, which will arrive with Photoshop 10 (presumably CS 3.0). Photoshop users will also have to wait until Version 10 for the software to use more than 2GB of RAM. Like the rest of the new Creative Suite 2.0 applications, Photoshop CS 2.0 will take advantage of Adobe's new cross-suite file browser, dubbed Bridge.

There have been rumblings that Creative Suite 2.0 will require stricter product activation than previous Adobe products, and sources say this new product activation mechanism could manifest itself in the stand alone version of Photoshop CS 2.0, as well.

Make of this scuttlebutt what you will… and of course, give us your opinions, educated guesses, wild speculations and wish lists in the comments.

Following up on Color Correction from RGB to CMYK, I also noticed some significant color shifts in the purples, which tend to convert into a dark blue… again, not even close to the original 100C, 1000M range. How to deal?

1. Go to Select -> Color Range…, then select Blues, Image, and Quick Mask. Click OK.

2. Go to Image -> Levels…, select the Cyan channel and change the middle input level from 1.00 to 1.50. Then select the Magenta channel and change the middle input level from 1.00 to .50. Adjust to taste.

Your purples should come back in full force.

One of these days, I'm just going to do the chart of comparisons and come up with a really good color correction scheme that adjusts colors correctly from CMYK to RGB and back to CMYK again…

I recently had to do a lot of flat color scans, and when I converted them to CMYK, I noticed some significant color shifts in the Yellow plate— in fact, 100% yellows that I applied in RGB turned to 5%C, 96%Y in CMYK.

Counter this after you switch modes by doing the following:

1. Go to Select -> Color Range…, then select Yellows, Image, and Quick Mask. Click OK.

2. Go to Image -> Levels…, select the Cyan channel and change the input level from 255 to 204 (or after the big spike in the histogram. You'll see it.) You may also want to select the Yellow channel and change the input level from 0 to 10 or so, to bring your yellows back to full strength.

You should be very pleased with the results. In fact, feel free to post before and afters in comments so others can see your results.

Believe it. Allume, the people who make the Stuffit archiver have created a new compression algorithm that they claim will losslessly compress JPEG files by an average of 30%. This algorithm is part of the Stuffit 9 software.

Jeff Gilchrist runs some tests and has benchmarks at http://compression.ca/act/act-jpeg.html. Be warned, the site is being swamped right now, so feel free to check back later.