Celebrity fails to memes: What 25 years of Photoshop has given us

This year Adobe’s much loved, misused and often criticised Photoshop software is celebrating 25 years. Adobe has even released a video showing the true brilliance of Photoshop and it’s real potential. Check out the video below.

Photoshop has now been around for so long, that just like ‘Xerox’ has become a verb (Xerox is the Company but we still say Xerox kara de), we are now happy to say ‘Photoshop kar de yaar’, even though it’s technically the name of the software.

Adobe’s Photoshop has given us reasons to hate celebrities and fashion magazines, create memes like ’ This looks shopped’ on the Internet and more recently get all excited when ‘un-retouched’ photos of celebrities are leaked online. We take a look at what Photoshop has come to mean in the past couple of years.

Celebrities and social media

Social media has ensured we don’t need to rely on paparazzi shots anymore to know what’s going on in the lives of celebrities. Celebrities now maintain Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr accounts to give us sneak peaks into their private lives. But often these sneak peaks are so obviously ‘photo-shopped’, that it doesn’t go unnoticed. Instagram might offer a hundred filters but it’s clear that for celebs, Photoshop is still the number one tool.

From Beyonce (who has been caught photoshopping her social media pics quite a number of times) to John Mayer, celebs just love this tool. Check out the two pictures below, one of Beyonce play golf where one of her thighs looks like it  has been wiped out. In the other one, John Mayer’s skin looks very vampirish. We know no Instragram filter is responsible for that kind of skin.

Fashion and Photoshop

Photoshop and Fashion magazines/photographs are like a match-made in heaven. We’ve seen magazine covers where models look suspiciously thin, where women have perfect skin, though we know that even Botox can’t guarantee that kind of look, where lips are fuller, where the make-up is so damn flawless that the average reader wonders what is wrong with them.

Of course, Photoshop is also responsible for some hilarious goof-ups by magazines where you’ll notice an entire arm or a leg missing. Then of course there’s the downright scary use of Photoshop where models appear so skinny that it would make even the healthiest person on the planet feel fat.

Photoshop and Memes

The ‘I think this might be Photoshopped’ is a meme favourite and captures some of the worst and most obvious disasters that tend to get shared on the Internet. The other version of the meme is ‘This Looks Shopped. I can tell from the Pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time.’ Below are three hilarious examples of photoshop fails that will leave you in splits. It’s so bad that its just funny.

The ‘un-Photoshopped photos

Sometimes what is not touched by Photoshop makes the biggest news. For instance, last year pop-star Lorde proved how awesome she was by pointing out that an airbrushed photo of her from one of her performances was fake. Lorde tweeted out the airbrushed photo along with one of her real skin and told her fans that it’s okay to have flaws. And she’s right, nobody has that kind of skin and there’s no reason to hide pimples.

More recently ‘un-retouched’ photos of former supermodel Cindy Crawford and also Beyonce went viral online.  Both pictures showed that the women don’t have perfect skin. In Beyonce’s case fans went ballistic on Twitter and the website that leaked the photos took them down, but not before it was shared by everyone on Twitter.

Crawford however told Marie Claire in an interview , “I really think…at any age…it’s learning to be comfortable in your own skin. If women would treat themselves with the same kind of love they give to their friends, that would be such a great gift we could give ourselves. What makes you the most attractive is self-confidence. That’s what people see." We wish Beyonce would also talk about the recent controversy but it seems unlikely.