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Politician uses Photoshop to create more diverse image
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You might think that if an American politician wants a picture with an ethnically diverse group of people, they would be able to find them and take a picture. That's not what Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett's campaign did recently, as they committed a Photoshop failure by adding people into a campaign picture who weren't anywhere near where the photo was being taken.
While many people have become accustomed to images being manipulated with Photoshop, the changes made by Governor Corbett's campaign are significant and obvious to most users. The Governor had his picture taken with a group of individuals who are primarily white. To make the image appear more diverse, a black woman was added to the image using Photoshop. While the group of individuals in the original picture are all looking at the Governor, the lone black person that was added into the image is staring blankly towards the camera. The focus, depth-of-field, and off-center stare are all indicators that the image has been manipulated using Photoshop.
Pennsylvania is a large, ethnically diverse state, effectively eliminating the need to use Photoshop to create an image containing people of different ethnic groups. The campaign admitted to using Photoshop to alter the image, and has since removed it from their website. This mistake from Governor Corbett’s campaign is one of many recent examples of Photoshop being used to add black people into imges in order to make a group appear more diverse, or to change the composition of a group so it may appeal more to an audience in a different culture. A university in Wisconsin even did this in an admissions catalog sevearl years ago, which also did not go unnoticed.
If you are going to be carrying out retouching tasks, Photoshop training classes at American Graphics Institute are a good way for making certain you have the skills needed to produce high quality images. A specialized Photoshop retouching training course is one of the many classes available to improve your skills so that you can avoid making mistakes that detract from your image and your message.
About the author
Jennifer Smith is a user experience designer, educator and author based in Boston. She has worked in the field of user experience design for more than 15 years.She has designed websites, ecommerce sites, apps, and embedded systems. Jennifer designs solutions for mobile, desktop, and iOT devices.
Jennifer delivers UX training and UX consulting for large Fortune 100 companies, small start-ups, and independent software vendors.She has served as a Designer in Residence at Microsoft, assisting third-party app developers to improve their design solutions and create successful user experiences. She has been hired by Adobe and Microsoft to deliver training workshops to their staff, and has traveled to Asia, Europe, India, the Middle East, and across the U.S. to deliver courses and assist on UX design projects. She has extensive knowledge of modern UX Design, and worked closely with major tech companies to create educational material and deliver UX workshops to key partners globally. Jennifer works with a wide range of prototyping tools including XD, Sketch, Balsamiq, Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Blend for Visual Studio. She also works extensively in the fields of presentation design and visual design.
Jennifer is also an expert on Photoshop, digital image editing, and photo manipulation. Having written 10 books on Photoshop, and having consulted and provided training to major media companies and businesses around the globe.
Jennifer is the author of more than 20 books on design tools and processes, including Adobe Creative Cloud for Dummies, Adobe Creative Cloud Digital Classroom, and Photoshop Digital Classroom. She has been awarded a Microsoft MVP three times for her work with user experience design in creating apps for touch, desktop, and mobile devices. Jennifer holds the CPUX-F certification from the User Experience Qualification Board and assists others in attaining this designation in leading a UX certification course at American Graphics Institute. She is a candidate for a Master’s degree in Human Factors in Information Design.