World Without Photoshop

One of the sight gags planned in the World Without Photoshop video was to make MacBook Pro’s look like shiny aluminum “CopyBook” scanners. We needed to replace the keyboard and trackpad with the guts of a flatbed scanner. The image you see above is straight off the camera. The illusion of a scanner bed is just a printed piece of paper sitting over the keyboard. No Photoshop was used in the making of that photograph, however a quick Photoshop trick was used in the making of the image in the photo. The obvious irony being that, like most of the props required to create video, we then needed to use Photoshop’s image distortion powers to pull it off.

This type of optical illusion is categorized as perspectival anamorphosis, and while it dates back to the early Renaissance painters, many people nowadays visually connect it with the work of chalk artists like Kurt Wenner and Julian Beever. If you have access to some really large format printers, you could easily scale this process up to street level. Another option would be to leverage Photoshop for the distortion, and then translate the image back to a drawing. — View Full Post