this article is from PRINT magazine and i thought it was kinda analagous to
the discussion going on pertaining to the abundance of stuff like the mc303
and rebirth and other things such as Emu's "planet phat" which thankfully
has yet to be dragged into the banter
read or delete at your own discretion...
Photoshop, one of the most versatile tools of the computer
age, offers relief to
more problems than a drugstore display.
Got a troublesome illustrator?
Photoshop will eliminate him. Got a picky
client? Photoshop will give her what
she wants. Got to make some filler?
Photoshop will produce something that
looks like art. Got a modicum of talent?
Photoshop will cure that in a jiffy.
The side effects include the instant
montages and collages that fill countless
publications. Thanks to Photoshop, it is
easy for lazy and mediocre designers
and illustrators to create lazy and
mediocre art.
It has been eight years since I attended a
workshop at Adobe's headquarters in
Palo Alto, California, where a small group
of illustrators were asked to
experiment with the as yet unnamed and
unreleased software. (See "Getting
Personal: Tales from Camp Adobe," PRINT,
January/February 1990.)
Supervised by a technical support team,
Paul Davis, Vivienne Flesher, J. Otto
Seibold, ten other illustrators, and I
played with the program. Some artists
scanned in and manipulated their own
existing artwork, while others collaged
images supplied by Adobe to create
compositions unlike anything they had done
before.
Previously only Scitex and Quantel
Paintbox, two high-end image processors,
permitted the ready manipulation of
artwork. Photoshop was the first program
that allowed the average Macintosh
operator to do so. And it soon became clear
to everyone in the beta group that what
had originally been intended as a
photo-retouching tool was destined also to
become an artistic tool, just as the
airbrush had.
It was also obvious that, given
Photoshop's easy capability to meld different
images seamlessly and quickly, this
program would be a boon to artists working
with collage and montage, as well as to
those who were merely looking for an
easy way to make imagery. But no one in
attendance dreamed that we would
begin to see the results so soon after the
program's release. Today there is an
infestation of Photoshop collages-layered,
often translucent, sometimes
reticulated images, sandwiched in
overlapping colors and feathered or shadowed
for a three-dimensional effect. Unless an
artist is very skilled at handling the
program's nuances, the look of something
"done in Photoshop" is unmistakable.
And the vast number of collages published
today have certainly made Photoshop
solutions the graphic cliché of the '90s.
It is too bad that a venerable artform is
being debased. Collage, used as early as
the mid-19th century, was first adapted to
modern art by the Cubists in the
1910s. Photomontage came into play a
decade later. Both methods led esthetic
revolutions and echoed political ones, and
like every popular art form, both
methods were sapped of vitality by too
frequent, too clumsy use. As they
reappeared in waves of popularity, in both
fine and commercial art, they became
predictable.
When applied intelligently, collage and
montage need not grow any more
tiresome than other forms of illustration.
But the media can mask incompetence,
including the inability to draw and think.
Digital art may be altered at whim,
making it easy for the art director or
client to impose changes. Artists are
encouraged to provide more options, since
it is so easy to move an element from
here to there. In the past, art directors
or designers who considered creating their
own collages, might well have been
frustrated by the level of skill required. With
Photoshop, the illustrator can be
replaced. Once-vital markets are drying up,
supplanted by either designer-made art or
the work of pliant digital artists. The
widespread availability of digital clip
art packages is further making illustrators
obsolete.
Almost every new process or style is
followed by a shakedown period.
Presumably, this is the shakedown of
Photoshop. We may soon see the lesser
practitioner learn to use it more
competently or turn to some other medium. In the
meantime, Photoshop as a production tool,
has been invaluable for translating
imagery into print. As an artistic tool,
its designer-friendliness is pushing
traditional illustration to the sidelines.
Steven Heller's most recent book is Design
Literacy: Understanding Graphic
Design (Allworth Press).