The folks at Adobe must get a huge kick out of the fact that the word “Photoshop” has become a part of everyday language. I wish I had a dime for every time some guy on the street who has seen that I’m carrying a camera has said to me: “Hey Buddy, could you take my picture and then Photoshop it so I look like Tom Cruise?”
(I live in a small town. A lot of "being-friendly" conversations with people I don’t know at the local post office or at the feed store seem to begin with the words “Hey Buddy”...)
Like facial tissue came to be known as “Kleenex” and gelatin desert is “Jell-O,” so it is that we live in a time when most people refer to any photo software as “Photoshop.” I’m sure the Adobe stockholders are smiling all the way to the bank, or to their retirement villas in Mexico.
Typically, I’m not an edgy user of Photoshop. Like many documentary and photojournalistic photographers, I use Photoshop to work with images on my computer the way I once used an enlarger and photographic paper to print negatives in the darkroom. "Reality" is what I seek in my imagery.
Still, sometimes it’s fun to play, and these home snapshots I did of our cat Basil gave me a chance to get a little funky with Photoshop’s “saturation” slider control.
Looking at these pictures with their psychedelic colors, I think I’m on the verge of a 60’s flashback. From out of the cosmos, a mind-tune begins to play in the scary, inner reaches of my brain:
“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”...
