Which is real? Which is doctored?

The doctored image (on the right) is produced by Zack Rousseau.

Visual Literacy is a concept that includes two factors.  The first of these is simply how perceptive you are of “fake” or “doctored” images.  The second factor associated with visual literacy is the ability to create your own “fake” or “doctored” images.  The images may include photography, and/or animations.

     It is important to have a good sense of visual literacy.  This means that it is important to have a critical eye when viewing things for the first time.  This is even more important when we think of the day and age we are living in.  We live in a time when computers are made available to many people all over the world.  With these computers one could easily take a picture, like a famous moment in time for example, and change it.  These changes may be small and harmless, but in some cases the changes may be large and drastic.  Keeping this in mind, it is easy to understand the importance of good visual literacy.

     For my image I decided to combine more than one picture rather then just using two photos because I thought that it would give me a greater experience of creating my own doctored photo.  Coming up with an idea for my image was pretty easy.  I have always wanted to visit the place where my family comes from – Jamaica.  I had also wanted to try to use a jet ski.  So, putting these two ideas together, I put my head on the body of a jet skier and then placed that on a picture of a Jamaican beach.  For fun I decided to put an afro on my head!

     I did not find the picture very difficult to create due to the fact that I had previously made doctored photos on my own.  I made this image the same way I had made my images in the past.  I used a digital image of myself and found the other photos on the Internet using the search engine www.google.com.  Once I gathered my photos I used Adobe Photoshop software to combine them into one creation.  Because the images were all different sizes I had to resize and crop each one individually.  Then it was just a matter of simply selecting the parts of each image I wanted to use and pasting them, as layers, onto my Jamaican beach background.  To make the image look more realistic I used the smudge tool and went along any rough edges.

     As always, I found this project very enjoyable.  I really like doctoring images and I always bring them to my friends and family to see if they will be fooled.  This time was no different; I took the image to all my friends and was pleased to see that they had to give it a second look to see if it was real.