"Just Photoshop it out. It's easy!"
Posted on: 4 May 2010
A website was recently brought to my attention - Clients From Hell - the name pretty much says it all. It features snippets submitted by designers who have had the disadvantage of working with less than desirable clients. It's certainly worth a read if you're a designer. I don't often rant about things, but there is a recurring theme throughout the articles that grinds my bones.
Photoshop, or any other design software, is a tool; a creative tool. Just like a piano is a tool for a musician, or a typewriter or word processor is a tool for a writer. Without the creative input, it is nothing. And yet, this concept is hard to grasp for some people. Another recurring theme is the misconception that Photoshop is some magical program with no limits. Take these snippets for example:
Client: Ok, for my album cover I’ve got the perfect image. It’s my girlfriend, and she’s sitting on her bed in red lingerie with photos of me all over the place, and they’re all on fire, and she’s screaming as she tears up a photo of me and dumps it in a marble bowl.
Me: Er, okay, can you send me that image?
Client: No, you have to make it in Photoshop, ‘cause we broke up.
"I was wearing a red shirt and jeans in that video I sent you. Can you put me in a suit instead? It’ll look more professional."
After handing me a picture, a client tells me, "We love this picture, so just zoom it out a little and it’ll be perfect."
The art director blew his stack "LOOK—THIS WON’T TAKE MORE THAN TWO HOURS!!" And then he added "I’D DO IT MYSELF IF I KNEW HOW TO USE PHOTOSHOP!!"
Client: Can you re-touch the hat off the man?
Me: Yes, what kind of hair would you like?
Client: You will see when you take the hat off.
"We don’t like the slideshow at the beginning of the movie. Can’t you turn the pictures into moving images?"
"We were thinking if you just photoshopped the lamp off the table, you’d be able to see the kids more clearly that are playing behind it."
Email from client: I’ve attached an image. Could you make it HD and send it back? *attached jpeg with dimensions: 32px by 54px*
"Can you take this photo of me and my baby and rotate the baby so you can see more of his face?"
"You should know what I want! You’re the professional! Why are you asking me to design my own poster? Just come up with something and stop wasting my time, I have far more important things to do being a director."
"We need to see this person’s face [points to person in photo with their back to a camera]. You need to turn the person around 180 degrees."
Because of the "Photoshop culture" we live in (see title) the misconception that Photoshop is some sort of easy automatic image manipulator seems to have formed. When in fact, Photoshop is a software package whereby a large amount of skill and experience is required to produce anything of any real quality. As for the "magic" quality of being able to literally manipulate the scene of a photograph, well all I can do is laugh. It's pixels on a screen, people... pixels on a screen. Although it does set the mind wondering about possibilities in the future of multi-layered photographs, able to capture every conceivable detail in a scene. That in its self seems a long way off though.
On another note, I'm starting my internship at BozBoz next week. Let's just say I'll be glad to be working with people who know what they're talking about.