Friday, May 29, 2009

The Mutant Hand of Marie Claire

Photoshop can easily become Phot-Oh-S**T!, as the editors at Marie Claire discovered recently.

Sharp-eyed Gordon Pritchard noticed this aberration (see photo) on the magazine's June cover.

His excellent Quality in Print blog normally deals with the finer points of prepress and printing, demonstrated with fabulous graphics. He even makes the concept of screen angles easy to understand.

But Gordo's not all business. Check out his hilarious summary of real-world magazine workflow in the context of the Marie Claire goof.

UPDATE: There's been a lot of debate on various sites about whether this is really a Photoshop mistake or just a huge cube ring on Beyonce's finger. See Gordo's new take on the image and on Photoshop disasters in general. And for more fun go right to the source, Photoshop Disasters.

4 comments:

Dial H 4 Hero said...

Are we sure that she's not wearing a cube ring? This is Beyoncé, after all. She could wear a hubcap and make it look good.

Anonymous said...

I gotta say I agree that it could well be a reflective cube ring. Once you see it, you can't not see it...

pixfixer said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
pixfixer said...

While this is funny to look at it is proof of a much larger problem. Just get a computer, load it with Photoshop, take courses and boom, your a pro. Who needs the patience to put in the time it takes to make the mistakes and get yelled at, do the practice, learn, acquire the skills that would allow a persons inner talent to come to the surface and know when they got it right. It does take time, patience and work to master any skill and in a "have it now" world, thinking we can do the job seems to be enough. Well, it is not. Need proof, the retoucher made a boo boo and the editor let it go to print on the cover no less and could not see what happened. That lack of patience to do the work it takes to be good at what we do lowers the bar and pushes us all down a notch or two. Not so funny now.