To learn more about the magic of Photoshop, we contacted Spanish visual horror artist Eduardo Valdés-Hevia.
Firstly, Valdés-Hevia explained there's a difference between image editing and manipulation. The first term is a more general one and includes any change you make to a picture. "Most professional photographers edit their shots, mostly in terms of color, contrast, and cropping in order to achieve a certain atmosphere and enhance the image," the artist told Bored Panda.
"Photo manipulation, on the other hand, usually refers to deeper changes in an image or combining several photos to create something new. This includes everything from removing pimples on someone's face to creating deceptive propaganda or, as in my case, producing art."
"Photo manipulation, or more specifically the composites you'll usually see in Photoshop battles, usually consist of adding a subject to a background," Valdés-Hevia said.
"The first step is finding a background image that fits your subject or vice versa, then masking the subject away from their original background, and then matching things like the lighting and color of both scenes, adding shadows and sometimes skewing perspectives to trick the eye into believing it's all a single picture!"
The artist highlighted that a very important part of Photoshopping something is hiding your edits, usually by hiding the most obvious edits with shadows, fog, or pretty much anything else you can imagine and manage.
Of course, such a multi-layered process poses a lot of challenges, but Valdés-Hevia thinks that "the biggest one when compositing images is usually the first step, finding the right background (or subject) to add into your photo."
"Ideally, you'll be able to find an image that already matches the perspective, lighting, and colors of the other one, but that's usually not the case," he explained. "The more different your background is from your subject, the more work you'll have to do to integrate it. As counterintuitive as it sounds the less work you need to do, the better your final image will look!"
If you also would like to try image manipulation, Eduardo Valdés-Hevia recommends getting some free software like Gimp, or some cheap one like Affinity, and just giving it a go.
"Photoshop battles are a great place to start, actually!" he said. "I used to participate in them when I was starting out and they were a wonderful learning experience! I also recommend looking up some people doing photo manipulation on YouTube or Twitch to pick up some techniques and see what other people's workflow looks like."
In fact, Valdés-Hevia has a Twitch channel himself and you can watch him in action here!
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Of course, there are purists who think a picture should remain the same as it was produced. But photo editing is almost as old as taking them. Consider Abraham Lincoln, for example.
During his 1860 campaign as a Republican candidate for the American presidency, right after the birth of photography but before its widespread dissemination in the media, Lincoln had a problem. A lot of US citizens didn't know what he looked like.
This gave rise to rumors of his ugliness. While the North Carolina newspaper The Newbern Weekly Progress focused more on his character, writing that Lincoln was "coarse, vulgar and uneducated," the Houston Telegraph, on the other hand, told its readers that he was “the leanest, lankiest, most ungainly mass of legs, arms and hatchet face ever strung upon a single frame. He has most unwarrantably abused the privilege which all politicians have of being ugly."
