By Graham K. Rogers

Adobe Photoshop is a well-known application used by many professional photographers and others in the graphics industry to make changes to the original file or, using layers, to build a whole new image from a series of separate inputs. Photoshop is a proper noun. However, the dictionary also recognises it as a verb: to "alter (a photographic image) digitally using computer software. From the verb comes the adjective, "photoshopped".

Photoshop is really a high end graphics manipulation program and with its many features, is perhaps too much for most ordinary users, especially considering its real price. That does not stop many installing it on their computers, wherever it was sourced from, in the same way that so many also install Microsoft Office because they need to write an occasional letter.

For my photography and graphics work, I make do with Aperture for workflow, Lemkesoft's GraphicConverter for most adjustments I cannot do in Aperture or manipulating screen shots; with GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) as a standby for the heavy stuff that is beyond the others (rare). I do also use some filtering apps ( for example Analog, Diptic, LinesmART) that have come from the Mac App Store, but prefer do that sort of work on the iPhone.

Photoshopping tends to have a sense of the dishonest about it and by coincidence I was came across two fairly good examples of this in the last couple of days. The first was provided by Timothy Geigner on TechDirt whose comments on an image that the quasi-religious Scientology had put out to prove their popularity, are humorous, with a sting in the tail.

• The Church of Scientology (sic) had claimed an attendance of some 2,500 at a rally in Portland, OR, and a photograph with a huge crowd appears online. However, as often happens at any event of this nature another photographer was there and his picture does not have the crowds, but it does have a line of rented trees that were used to keep unfriendly people out. Both pictures are shown in the article for others to make their own comparisons.

  

• Item number two in this poor company is an image from Samsung, whose massive advertising budget does not apparently run to their own photographers. Instead, John Brownlee on Cult of Mac reports that they used a stock image from Shutterstock and photoshopped a Samsung Galaxy S4 into the model's hand.

  There are a couple of problems here, he writes, in that first, it is a well-known series and in her hand before was an iPhone 3Gs. In addition, whoever did the photoshopping, forgot the idea of scale and with the 5" screen of the S4, "implies a woman who is over eight-feel tall [My source for the John Brownlee item was MacDaily News].

Also Steve Calpin on The Guardian has a gallery of several other examples of the photoshopper's work. A Google search can provide many more. As a side note, I would refer anyone reading this to the excellent article that appeared recently on The Verge by Michael Shane about Peter Belanger who takes many of the product photographs Apple uses. No Shutterstock images there.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand where he is also Assistant Dean. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.