Why am I doing this?

Photoshop Fun with Finch: I made this for Kelly Oxford a few weeks ago. She didn’t ask me to. She didn’t respond to it. She probably didn’t see it. That’s fine. I don’t photoshop well-known people for the attention. I do it for the lulz (which is the only reason to do anything). But I wanted to post this here and show people that Photoshop can do some amazing things if you know how to use it.

First off: I am 40 percent color blind, so i do my best to rely on the sliders and info provided within the program. So if the color is a bit off, then it is.

The photo of Kelly has not been manipulated as far as color balancing or correcting. I think I might have desaturated it just a touch. It is one of those photos where very poor lighting fucks up the color spectrum. This is fine. She’s still a lovely woman…even though she’s Canadian.

Now look at the photo of Oprah. Very well lit. Proper colors. Nice, clean resolution.

Getting it to look like Oprah is sitting right behind Kelly required roughly 30-40 minutes of intense filtering/adjusting color/making duplicate copies of the Oprah layer. I believe I added Noise, then blurred it, then sharpened it, added film grain, more noise, blurred again. Repeating processes and knowing when to save a layer, copy it, then work on that copy to get it to the next step, is key.

Photoshop may seem like some quick thing people do, but some of us really do our best to sell it. My Photoshop work isn’t perfect but you really only need to sell the joke for the first two seconds. If people laugh, then beginning to look for the fake, then you’ve succeeded.

Then again, there are the absurd uses that can also get a laugh out of people. Some efforts take 5 minutes and get thousands of views.

Believe me, I have done some hard work requiring hundreds of hours on various projects that I think are the greatest things I could ever have spawned, and they are virtually ignored. Then I’ve done things that I considered “throw away” that resonate with the masses.

Same thing with Photoshops: some take hours to make and nobody ever sees them. That’s the roll of the dice and just like writing books, screenplays, or music, you just have to keep creating if you want to get somewhere.

I don’t know what I would do without Photoshop. it’s just too much fun.

Finch