Photos That Lie

I chose for this project to combine two pictures.  I took the picture of the deer at a ranch in South Texas last winter and the picture of the crazy looking fish I used for the head I took probably about 5 years ago down at the coast.  I basically edited the fish's picture so that only the head was left.  I used the magic extractor tool to take the fish out of its picture. Then I had to remove a hook that was sticking out of the corner of its mouth and the ends of a pair of pliers my brother was using to hold the fish when I took the picture. I then decided just how much of the fish's head I want to use and erased the rest of the body.  It was pretty easy because this particular species of fish has this strange almost armor looking plate over its head and the rest of the body is smooth.  I simply deleted the smooth body and was left with the hard armored head.  I decided to leave a couple fins sticking off the head so that they would look like little fin-beards under the deer-fish's head.  I then used the move tool to move the fish's head on to the background of the deer.  I rotated the fish so that it lined up correctly with the antlers and the ears.  I then decided to move the fish's eye down to a more natural looking position so I selected just the eye and moved it down a bit.  I then used the cloning stamp to carry some of the deer's fur down over the fish's head to smooth out the lines between the image and make it look continuous.  Then I had to go in and adjust the saturation, hue, brightness, contrast and shadows of the fishes image to match that of the deer. It was tricky because the image of the fish was taken on a bright summer day and there was a lot of shine off of the fish's head and the deer's picture was taken on an overcast winters day and was much duller.  Luckily the color of the fish and the deer were close enough that it didn't take much adjustment to match them up.  
I manipulated this image this way simply because I thought it would be comical and strange looking.  I don't think this manipulation was harmful at all, just good clean fun.  Im never going to try to pass this new creature off as anything real or try to convince someone the image is unaltered.  The article I read was an interesting one about studying cells from pictures that have been altered.  Sometimes scientists will edit images of cells either intentionally or otherwise to make them easier to see or differentiate.  Often times these scientist do not consider what they may be changing when they do what they think is an improvement.  Changing the saturation or something or an image of a cell may detract from the accuracy of any observations garnered from looking at the photo.  Of course you would never want to studying something biological by looking at a photo edited in the way that mine is but there are certain things that can be done to make important things easier for scientists to see.  They just have to be careful that the manipulation doesn't have any unintended consequences and that anyone else who looks at the photo later knows how and why it has been altered so that they don't see something in it that isn't really there.  


Pinco, Jeffery, et al. "Impact of Digital Image Manipulation in Cytology." Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine 133.1 (2009): 57-61. Print.