from Hacker News

Jennifer in paradise: the story of the first Photoshopped image (2014)

by Schiphol on 9/2/24, 11:33 AM with 112 comments

• by burningChrome on 9/3/24, 5:31 PM

  For me, this is the most important point of the article:

  And although, as Knoll is quick to point out, photos were being altered long ago in Soviet Russia, it was only Photoshop that democratised that ability. In a way Jennifer was the last person to sit on solid ground, gazing out into an infinitely fluid sea of zeros and ones, the last woman to inhabit a world where the camera never lied.

  We now live in a world where anything we see, we hear, or speak is never taken on its value any more. You can have a picture of you standing next to Kim Kardashian and everybody will wonder if its actually you standing next to her - or did you manipulate the photo? You can watch a video and we now wonder if what we're seeing is actually real or not.

  This photo was the last off ramp to a reality where nothing truly is what it seems anymore. I never thought or could imagine the world I currently reside in.

• by vundercind on 9/3/24, 3:08 PM

  Oh my god. The demo video using the super-early version of Photoshop just taught me several things the lasso and magic wand tools can do in combo that I’ve never known, despite a lot of time using them over the years.

• by sandworm101 on 9/3/24, 4:20 PM

  It is a photo that lends itself to photoshopping. Wide vista with distinct objects that do not interact. Solid borders between objects (horizon, green island on blue sky). Blocks of relatively homogenous texture. A near total lack of shadows, with the only one visible conveniently blurred by shallow water. And a subject exotic/remote enough that most people will not recognize any inconsistencies. It is so open to editing that I could believe it was built from scratch.

• by rwmj on 9/3/24, 9:35 AM

  I remember being amazed by this 1986 documentary, where David Hockney uses a Quantel Paintbox to do digital painting & image manipulation:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-JpI4egl2o

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantel_Paintbox

• by rjsw on 9/2/24, 11:49 AM

  A recent Reddit thread [1] has some pictures of the Pixar Image Computer mentioned in the article.

  [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/1f3lzr...

• by lelanthran on 9/3/24, 7:26 AM

  Pity they don't have the "before" photo, so we can see what the photoshop effort added.

• by diggan on 9/3/24, 5:32 PM

  Related: "Lenna" - A pretty much de facto standard image for testing image editing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna (and a personal story behind the image: http://www.lenna.org/)