Photoshop contest

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Please improve this article if you can. (April 2007)

This collage, titled "Strong Mead" is a Photoshopped mix of different paintings by Salvador Dalí and qualified for the final.

A Photoshop contest, or sometimes photochop contest, is an online game, in which a website or user of an Internet forum will post a starting image — usually a photograph — and ask others to manipulate the image using some kind of graphics editing software, such as Photoshop, Corel Photopaint, The GIMP, Paint Shop Pro, Paint.NET or for those posting on a work computer, Microsoft Paint.

1 Humor
2 Photoshop tennis
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Humor

Photoshopped "early computing" hoax, winner of a photoshop contest Fark.com, by user "lukket"; this image even fooled news publications as to its authenticity.

Contests often require all participants to edit a single source picture in a humorous—often with a unifying theme—as is common on Fark. Alternatively, participants may edit any picture of their choosing so that the results have a common theme as is usual on Something Awful. The users then go off and edit images to the requirements and post their results to the site. Once all the users have submitted their versions of the image, they vote on the quality of the other user's submissions. The user whose image receives the most votes wins.

A large part of the humor in many of these contests involves the use of clichés — often the result of a tremendous repetition of the joke from a funny image; so much so that the original joke is lost and using the cliché itself is the joke. Such clichéd pictures can often become internet phenomena. Here is a list of some of the most oft-used clichés:

Domo-kun
Admiral Ackbar, and his phrase "It's a trap!".
A tourist standing on the World Trade Center with a plane about to hit it.
An image of a disheveled James Brown.
An image which accompanied the joke "Arguing on the internet is like running in the Special Olympics. Even if you win, you're still retarded".
An image of a large man holding a large can of mustard, with his arm drenched in mustard.
An (often obscure) reference to goatse.cx.
All your base are belong to us.
The O rly owl.
The Preved bear — A bear from the modified John Lurie's watercolor Bear Surprise is placed into pictures, photographs and videos.
A picture with the captions "X is watching you poop."
The usage of, or making a photo resemble a lolcat
An image of a man with gold spray paint around his nose and mouth that he had been using as an inhalant.[1]

Such contests are nowadays finding increasing participations in many blogs. A more "underground" variety of these image manipulation jokes involves the blending of celebrity faces with nude or pornographic images, often combined with references to movies, music, magazines and other forms of related popular culture.

[edit] Photoshop tennis

Photoshop tennis is a game played through sequential alternating photoshopping of an image. Photoshop tennis, also referred to as a Photoshop battle (similar in its function to a "DJ battle" in hip hop music), originated in graphics-related internet forums in the late-1990's/early-2000's, and was made popular by art director Jim Coudal in 2001 as "Photoshop Tennis".^[1] The matches on coudal.com have since been renamed "Layer Tennis",^[2] as they are no longer restricted to the use of Adobe Photoshop.

Each match of Photoshop tennis is generally played with two competing players,^[1] though doubles matches, as in the sport tennis, or other multiplayer matches are theoretically possible. The players pick a starting image, or one is "served" by a player, then another player makes some sort of alteration to the image in any chosen image editor (matches are not exclusive to Adobe Photoshop). He or she then sends that altered image to the other player or players, usually via e-mail or by posting the image to a Photoshop tennis forum, who then edits that image and sends it back to the first player. This process goes back and forth until a predetermined number of rounds have elapsed, or the players otherwise wish to end the game. When the final round is over, there may be an independent judge who determines who has played the best shots, and declares that person the winner, or players may play without a clear winner. Sometimes extra rules can be enforced, such as sticking to one particular software package, or keeping to a particular theme.