Fauxtography, or Manipulating an Image to Tell a Story

Nice piece on photography and fauxtography by The Verge. It talks about certain automated actions in photography but I think it speaks to photo manipulation in general. Long before smartphones and Photoshop were invented, some photographers still manipulated their images in the dark room. These were under the category of fine art photography, and it helped a photographer use the picture to tell the story in their head.

For the longest time, we’ve had a seemingly clear dividing line between shots straight out of the camera (colloquially referred to as SOOC) and examples of fauxtography where the shooter has indulged in applying some after effects like filters, vignettes, recoloration, or masking and inserting objects in the frame. Phones are now stampeding over that line.

Get Free Photoshop Online With Photopea

Yesterday the creator of Photopea did a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). Photopea is free Photoshop online.

My name is Ivan Kutskir, I am 28 y.o. and live in Prague, the Czech Republic. I studied Computer Science and I enjoy programming. I am the author of www.Photopea.com , which is an advanced image editor, that works in a web browser. There was about 1.5 millions of visitors in October. After the first 7 000 hours of work (around 5 hours a day during 3.5 years), I haven’t made a single dollar (it was just my hobby during the college). Then, I put advertisement into it, and it makes me a decent income now (decent for a single person in Prague).

I had never heard of Photopea before, but I played around with it and it’s an impressive tool.