Got this off of Gizmodo about a week ago. Someone decided to hammer home the point about fascistic overuse of Photoshop in advertising by slapping blown-up prints of Photoshop tool palettes on a big poster advertisement in a Berlin subway. Priceless.

For those who amongst my readership who may not get the joke (hi Dad!), Adobe Photoshop is a powerful piece of software for creating and editing digital images. And while it is a robust tool for content creation, its single most common use is in the manipulation of photographic imagery. With a massive array of functions for adjusting every aspect of both black-and-white and color images, it is the preeminent tool for devout amateurs and industry professionals alike, and is the standard to which all other products are compared. So much so that the verb “Photoshop”—to alter a digital image using software—has become part of the lexicon, and is included in both the Oxford English and the Merriam-Webster Dictionaries.

While there are a host of other programs out these that also serve this function—and every few years someone tries to entice consumers with the next “Photoshop Killer”—Adobe Photoshop remains the king of this particular realm, and the standard to which all other products are compared.

As such, the message inherent in affixing Photoshop tool palettes to a poster slathered with flawless beauty queens—that is to say, with people who are, in their current iteration, the very product of the software—is a great inside joke to the passers-by who have the skill set to recognize it. Probably only about fifteen or twenty percent of the population, ‘strooth, but isn’t that the whole point of an inside joke? If everyone understood and reacted to it appropriately it would be….well, it’d probably be just another advertisement.

This also gives me an excuse to trot out one of my favorite videos, created by the Dove company as part of their “Campaign For Real Beauty“. This movie also showcases the power of Photoshop to do evil as well as good. Requires QuickTime to view.

[quicktime width=”480″ height=”375″]http://www.uncle-andrew.net/blog/movies/evolutions.mov[/quicktime]