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Photoshop disaster strikes government of Myanmar
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Photoshop disasters aren’t limited to retailers and pop-stars, as this weekend the government of Myanmar distributed a poorly edited image. The Ministry of Information or Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, shared a picture of the country’s deputy minister,Su Su Hlaing after she arrived at an airport.
The female minister has a colleague walking behind and quite close to her, in a pose that would suggest he is carrying an umbrella to shield her from the sun. The image also shows the shadow of an umbrella, yet there is no umbrella visible anywhere in the picture.
While there is no clear reason as to why the umbrella was photoshopped from the image, it’s yet another example of a poor use of Photoshop, something that might have been addressed through Photoshop training. While learning Photoshop might help to improve the retouching, there is no need to remove something such as an umbrella from a news picture. In the case of this image, it was originally shared on social media sites such as Facebook by the government.
The poorly retouched image has since been removed from the government’s official social media accounts, but the story is already around the world. Businesses, organizations, and even governments can learn that significantly altering images generally leads to more unflattering attention than the original image itself. Had the image been distributed with the umbrella, it would have been entirely uneventful. Yet by doing a poor job with Photoshop, the image has become yet another example of how to not use Photoshop.
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.