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Photoshopping is the art and practice of digitally editing pictures with image editing software. The name comes from Adobe Photoshop, the image editor most commonly used for the practice, although other programs, such as Paint Shop Pro, Corel Photopaint, or the GIMP may be used. Adobe discourages use of the term "photoshop" as a verb out of fear that it will undermine the company's trademark; for this reason, some people have called it photochopping.

Although professional graphic artists and designers might describe elements of their work as "photoshopping", the practice is more commonly associated with creating visual jokes on Internet sites. In this way, photoshopping can be seen as another way of producing cartoons, but without the need to generate original drawings. As such, the edits can be done in a very basic way, so it is clear that the image has been altered (often humour is derived from this fact), or in a hyper-realistic way so that the changes are seamless.

Examples of photoshopping include people changing a picture of a well known actress to make it appear as if she has posed nude. In other examples two or more pictures are combined together for humour value. Packaging is also regularly "rebranded" for satirical purposes.

Similarly to photoshopping, some neologisms are derived from the names of other image editing packages, for example "to gimp up" an image.

Many Photoshopped images are propagated memetically via e-mail as humour or passed as actual news. Some well known images include Every time you masturbate... God kills a kitten and Shark and Helicopter. The latter image was widely circulated as a National Geographic 'Image of the Year' and was later revealed to be a hoax.

Methods

Tools particularly useful for photoshopping are:

• The magic wand tool, which can isolate objects for removal, or for copying to a different photograph.
• The clone tool, which can fill in a hole in the background after an object has been removed.

See also

• Adobe Photoshop
• Photo manipulation
• Photoshop contest
• Photoshop tennis
• E-mail art

External links

• Proper use of the Photoshop trademark
• B3ta
• Fark.com
• Mechapixel Daily Photoshop Contests
• Photoshopcontest.com
• Something Awful's Photoshop Phriday feature
• Worth1000

• Artistic techniques
• Photography