Yes, I did. I got a cute picture of my granddaughters, and one of the older ones was inadvertently (I'm hoping), showing a little more cleavage than Old Grandma thought necessary. Ten minutes with Photoshop and things are good, at least from my perspective. If I was a little better skilled with the program, it wouldn't have taken me that long, but who cares? In the end, I did what a grandma needs to do.
As I was working, I thought about my own grandmother, Lill. She was the original Photoshop Master, and she never went anywhere near a computer. Her method of choice was Contact Paper. Remember that stuff? That wonderful-but-cheesy sticky paper that you could use inside your kitchen cabinets and drawers, on tabletops, or wherever you needed a quick and cheap "makeover." What a feeling of success when installation went smoothly, and whatever you were sticking it to was totally transformed... and what a feeling of exasperation if you weren't careful and the adhesive side stuck to something it wasn't meant to.
Grandma took Contact Paper a step further. Sitting in her living room one afternoon, I saw a new picture of my cousin and her little boy hanging on the wall. The background was lovely - daisies! I remarked about what a nice picture it was, and she had me look at it closer. The daisies were covering my cousin's ex-boyfriend! Grandma had painstakingly cut out these flowers from Contact Paper and strategically placed them, and the result was actually good! Looking closer at the other photos on the wall, I noticed another where the divorced spouse had been "flowered-over." This phrase became a part of our family's legacy, as spouses were jokingly threatened with being flowered-over from that point on.
I kind of shudder when I think about what Grandma might have done with a computer and Photoshop. Ex-husbands and wives would be gone from the family photos in a millisecond; that grandson with the long, shaggy hair would gotten a respectable haircut; eye makeup would have been toned down.
And I take comfort in the fact that none of *her* granddaughters would have sported any cleavage either.
It's impressive that she was able to so carefully and accurately place the flowers. And very, very funny.
ReplyDeleteI noticed on today's Geneabloggers post that today was the first day a newspaper published a photograph. As I searched for information about that one of the topics that came up in the search results was photo manipulation (as opposed to touch-ups). Even though the first photo in a newspaper was published in 1848, I'm sure your grandmother was the first to manipulate a photo by her method!