Gelinck is a self-taught “photoshoppper”. He spends between one and three hours on each image. "Sometimes, I react to a news item, a birthday, or day of death and then post an edit of that celeb as an honor or celebration," he previously told Bored Panda. Gelinck has become somewhat of a celebrity in his own right. And many of the famous faces he's featured love his work. Madonna, Sylvester Stallone, Ricky Gervais, and Snoop Dogg are among some of those who have shared his photos.
Gelinck uses editing software called Adobe Photoshop. He has this advice for anyone wanting to try their hand at some digital photo manipulation: "You have to buy that software and just begin and try and practice a lot until, in my case, you have the luck that a lot of people like it." But as we’ll explain a bit later, sometimes you’ll need a lot more than luck to ensure success. And to avoid your photos being shared for all the wrong reasons.
Gelinck made headlines again this year when he took his "Then And Now" series a step further. He photoshopped some images and then enlisted the help of a “friend” to finish the work. The photos were turned into a video that showed celebrities hugging their younger selves.
“MINDBLOWING!!” he posted on Instagram in July. “Of the 20 images in this video, I created 17 and someone(Ai) finished it.” Followed by a bunch of emojis. Gelinck then went on to say that it was unbelievable, and "Ai is fun but also really, really crazy and scary and also moving. Ai don’t know where this ends."
Gelinck’s post managed to clock up over 20 thousand likes on Instagram. But it was met with mixed reactions. Some were wowed. While others were clearly freaked out. X user @jrawson shared the video and joked that they “might have found the most cursed thing on the internet”.
@aerocles reposted the video with the caption, “Hey AI what would it look like if a bunch of celebrities were in love with their younger selves? Make it really awkward and creepy.”
“Even with recent years' leaps and bounds in sophistication, these sorts of outputs are still so uncanny that they even seem to freak out the people creating them — a certain indictment of the reality of generative AI as it stands today,” wrote The_Byte.
It’s intentionally obvious that Gelinck's his images are photoshopped. But there are times some other people have posted overpolished pictures that they want us to believe are perfectly pure. Some photoshop fails that were definitely not the flex they set out to be.
The royal family rocked the boat big time this year, when Kate Middleton released a Mother’s Day photo. It featured the princess sitting on a chair, flanked by her three children. The pic was uploaded to Instagram, and landed in the inboxes of news editors around the world. To the untrained eye, it seemed like nothing out of the ordinary.
But within a few hours, the photo was pulled from some of the biggest news agencies on the planet. Associated Press, AFP, and Reuters, all refused to publish the photo, saying it had been altered in violation of their photography standards.
