Above: The ultimate photobomb – 2007 Topps card featuring Derek Jeter with Mickey Mantle in the dugout and George Bush waving from the stands. Topps spokesman Clay Luraschi told the AP: “We saw it in the final proof and we could have axed it, but we decided to let it run, we wanted to print it. We thought it was hilarious.”

In the realm of card collecting, no other company is more notorious for retouching photos than Topps – they have airbrushed out logos, changed uniform colors and even photobomb popular players (see above). With the advent of Photoshop, fake photobombing may be a new recreational pastime for the Topps creative department, but the removal of logos and changing of uniforms has been well documented throughout the history of the company.

Above: Two cards of John Brockington from the 1972 Topps football card set. On the left is his rookie card which shows him in his college all-star jersey, and on the right is his All-Pro card which shows the same photo with the jersey airbrushed green.

It seems Topps likes to show players in their current uniforms – it doesn’t matter to them whether that player has just been signed or traded and photos of him in action on the new team are either scarce or non-existent. The most recent offense is in the 2010 Topps set of  Seattle Mariners pitcher Cliff Lee (see image on right). Considering Lee has yet to play a game for the Mariners, the fact that the image on this card has been fudged is, well, glaringly obvious. Even disregarding that fact, the blue cap he is shown wearing is not the official Mariner blue and the black circle patch with the white “HK” that is over his heart on the jersey is a memorial patch worn last season by the Phillies to honor legendary game caller and sportscaster Harry Kalas who passed in April of 2009. That’s some pretty shoddy retouching work. It almost would have been better to photobomb him.

Update: The site Baseball Think Factory linked to this story (hi BBTF folks!), and the comments that ran under the post on their site have some great insight (and funny commentary) on these and other Shopped Topps cards so I am linking to it here.

Related articles…

Card trick: Bush, Mantle cheer Jeter in gag image [ESPN]

Topps fails to erase all of Cliff Lee’s ties to Philly on new card [Yahoo! Sports]

Topps Screws Up The Cliff Lee Card [Crossing Broad]

Airbrushed Fridays [Cards on Cards]

Airbrushing Football Cards [Nearmint’s Vintage Football Card Blog]

Above: Two of Spy magazine’s infamous “spoof” covers – Hillary Clinton as a dominatrix (from 1993) and George Bush Sr. with “cutout hair” (from 1989).

Spy magazine was a publication known for the manipulated images which often graced the covers, and the satirical wit which always occupied the inside pages. Spy ran monthly from October 1986 to May 1993, and now founder Kurt Andersen has put all 71 covers online for your viewing pleasure. (The only drawback is the small images can’t be enlarged.)

Anderson says of Spy’s manipulated covers…

Realistic digital manipulation of existing pictures was newly possible back  then, but difficult and incredibly expensive — the first primitive Photoshop software didn’t appear until 1990 — and probably the best of our giant-computer-generated covers were Ted Kennedy being splashed with water (November 1987), Jerry Lewis & Dean Martin brawling for “Feuds” (November 1988), the pregnant naked Bruce Willis (July 1991), Hillary Clinton as a dominatrix (January 1993) and Bill Clinton as Pinocchio (May 1993).

[view the gallery of SPY covers]

Oh Spy, how I miss thee…

[mouse over to see the original image]
In this well-known doctored photograph (taken circa 1936), Mao Tse-tung (right) had Po Ku (far left in the mouse over image) removed.

I tweeted A couple weeks back about artist and photographer Zhang Dali’s installation called “A Second History” which shows doctored archival photographs published in China during the Mao era alongside the original images newly printed from negatives. It is quite a glimpse into how retouched photography is used to improve a government’s public image.

One of the pieces shown in Zhang Dali’s installation “A Second History” now on display at the SZ Art Center in northern Beijing.

Zhang told the Wall Street Journal…

“I started this research because I was wondering how to explore what is not clearly visible,” he explains. “I was wondering how to get into the head of someone else—the censors, in this instance. My photographic project has revealed some unexpected things: the main one, that propaganda is much more complex than it seems; it encompasses more than simply making a political point. What the censors were doing was not simply faking documents but also obeying the aesthetic requirements of the time. Unattractive faces become beautiful, short people become tall, narrow eyes are widened, people looking too scruffy in countryside scenes are deleted altogether,” he comments, showing an album of some of his findings.

The message to be conveyed was at times presented subtly, as in one of Mr. Zhang’s favorite examples, a famous picture from 1952 that sees Premier Zhou Enlai, Mao and Gen. Zhu De saluting the parading troops from a podium on the 25th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army. In the original shot, one can spot the half-visible heads of five young, smiling soldiers in the background, the leaders protected by a balustrade in front of them, with two round paper parasols shading their heads from the fierce August sun. But this version of the photo was short-lived. In the one that most Chinese are familiar with, the balustrade is gone—and so are the delicate parasols, replaced by a more solemn-looking plaque of the People’s Liberation Army, with the dates “1927-1952″ underneath in bold white numbers. And in the background the smiling faces have been replaced by plant leaves, leaving the three men to salute in solitary splendor.

If you are interested in Zhang’s installation, you can read more about it in the Wall Street Journal article excerpted above, and you can see more imagery from “A Second History” at artron.net.

Yesterday I got all old lady cranky pants on you about how the way things used to be. Well, today I continue with the fist shaking and yelling at you to get off my lawn…

I wrote a post a couple months back for those of you who are looking for guides on how to use Photoshop. Today I’d like to write about an “old school” photo retouching guide that makes for interesting reading and is free for you to download. This is a guide that shows you how your grandparents were Shopped.

Figures 8, 9 & 10 showing the removal of wrinkles; taken from the book The art of retouching and Improving negatives and prints by Robert Johnson and Arthur Hammond (©1941 – 14th edition)

I stumbled across this little literary gem a few days back and my eyes have been devouring it ever since. I think it is perfect reading for photographers and designers who want to learn the history of their craft; as well as for those people who are just curious how photos were retouched prior to the invention of Photoshop (which just celebrated its 20th anniversary). With today’s advanced image editing technology people are able to do things like add cigarettes into photos, but even without that modern technology people were still able to remove cigarettes from photos…

Figures 5 & 6 showing the removal of wrinkles, facial blemishes, cigarette and finger; taken from the book The art of retouching and Improving negatives and prints by Robert Johnson and Arthur Hammond (©1941 – 14th edition)

As mentioned in both captions, the book is The art of retouching and Improving negatives and prints, and it is available for download free from the internet archive in multiple file formats. Yes, you can download a book about photo retouching written in 1941 and read it on your Kindle Wireless Reading Device. Isn’t the internet awesome?

Kids these days! With their fancy new fan-dangled Photoshop skills! Them mouse clickin’ whippersnappers! Don’t they know that when I was a kid I had to use a DARKROOM and I had to DRAW ON PHOTOS to make ‘em look good? Of course, this was all after I had to walk to the darkroom uphill – both ways – in 5 feet of snow!

Seriously though, we’ve come a long way, baby. There was a time when your editor came to you with a photo – one photo – for your layout, and no matter how craptacular that photo was you had to make it work. Sure, there were things that could be handled in the darkroom, but the darkroom had its limitations. Usually you wound up at a light table with a print of your photo, some markers or paint and your steady hand drawing in the details.

This practice really was standard operating procedure in the print industry, and not just a propaganda tool used by evil dictators. Why did we do this? Well, because the craptacular photo had to have a screen put over it eventually in order for it to be printed and that would cause it to lose a lot of the detail and contrast, thus making it look even more craptacular than the original.

An image of the Pioneer Mother and Liberty Memorial that was used for a story that was printed in the Kansas City Star back in 1965.
[click to enlarge image]

Recently, Derek Donovan of the Kansas City Star wrote about a photo he came across in the paper’s archives (above) that illustrates just how much, uh, illustration was used back in the day…

While looking through some of The Star’s photo archives this morning, I came across this image, which was published in 1965. At that time, the presses used to print newspapers were not capable of very fine detail in photographs. So to make the objects in images discernable, it was common practice to actually paint on top of a raw print, then photograph that finished product for publication.

The image you see here is probably the most heavily-overpainted example I’ve ever found in the archives. … Ostensibly a picture of the Pioneer Mother and Liberty Memorial, you can see that very little of the resultant image was actually captured by the camera’s lens. Every bit of the Pioneer Mother and the Memorial are pure paint, as are the beams of light and the “snow” piled around the base of the statue. The trees at the right have been enhanced meticulously.

There’s a clipping of the actual paper taped to the back of the photo, and it shows that the final printed result didn’t look nearly as painterly.

[read entire article]

If photo retouching prior to the Photoshop era interests you, please check back tomorrow because there’s more to come! (Update: You can find that post here.)