LAX

The Estee Lauder billboard image was actually one that I took while at LAX dropping off my cousin. When I stepped into the terminal, these huge billboards immediately caught my attention, and as I shared in class, I was instantly drawn to how “manufactured” the women looked. This gave me an idea to do some subtle editing to the image to redirect its message. To do this, I used the spot-healing brush with the content-aware fill we learned about to modify the text area of the billboard. This was mainly to maintain the even lighting of that area of the image. I then added the text, including some of the most-used tools for editing images of people (we used these in our experiments with “Mr. Darcy”). Lastly, I added the Photoshop logo to stand in on the bottle and used puppet warp to give the logo an angled look and feel.

The edit in the text of the billboard is meant to show that Photoshop plays such a big part in our everyday lives that we hardly even notice it. Almost any image, ad, billboard, etc. we see has been modified and it is remarkable that these tools and technology have made it so simple that we now take it for granted. We go on without questioning. We go without doubting. The subtleness of the edits is merely a reflection of how subtle manufactured beauty inserts itself into our lives and our thoughts.