rivetz posted:

Something Awful and the golden age of Photoshop Phridays is basically the entire reason I took on image editing as a hobby back in the early 2000s. I've done hundreds of em around here over the past two-plus decades. One of the things I realized early on when it comes to Photoshopping is that stylistically there are as many approaches as there are to telling a joke. Are you going broad or subtle? Are you using text? If you're going w a pop-culture reference, do you go for low-hanging fruit (less inventive, maybe wider appeal) or some deep cut (maybe funnier, maybe lose some viewers)? Is "put [A] into [B]" enough to tell the joke? Just like details can bog down a joke told in person, sometimes other visual elements (even if they're funny) can hurt more than help, distracting the viewer and diffusing(?) the joke's impact.

When you're dealing with a bad source image, you have several options (listed in general order of my personal preference):

1) You can doll it up as best you can and get it looking good enough that it doesn't distract from whatever joke you're trying to tell.
2) You can sometimes dial down the quality of other elements to match the worst one. There are a number of ways to do this; sometimes you can get there by pulling everything out of normal context, using filters or other tricks to make it into an oil painting, a low-res video game or something, masking the drop in overall quality by making the joke about something else.
3) You can lean into it and make the bad image quality part of the joke; this can work really well if you have a good enough idea.
4) You can go in a different direction altogether and reduce reliance on the image's quality. The most obvious example is animation, a great tool for taking attention away from the image itself and placing it on whatever the image is doing.

I'm writing this out because I'm so pissed about the quality of the Trump mugshot pic. The skin tone is weird even for Trump, the resolution sucks, the lighting is a pain in the rear end, the whole thing just screams you can gently caress with adjustments all you want pal, it's still gonna look like poo poo. When I do jokes for SA I typically go for as much photorealism as I possibly can, and this pic has just sucked the motivation right out of me. It's like if I needed one more reason to hate this loving guy, that's the cherry on top. Fuckin rear end in a top hat can't even take a decent picture sitting still in front of a camera three feet away from him.