The Longest Route To Avoiding Photoshop

Part of the appeal of doing something the long way is exactly that: proving you have the guts to reinvent the wheel. When Stephen Doyle was asked to help with the New York Times story What If The Secret To Success Is Failure? he decided to try something that would have been rather easy to produce in post production. Instead of relying on Photoshop, Stephen used forced perspective to physically write out words within different scenes. The final images appear to have words written on top of the images but infact they are embedded into each photograph directly. Check out both videos below as well as the three images from the final published article.

First BTS Video:


Second BTS Video:

Patrick Hall's picture

Patrick Hall is a founder of Fstoppers.com and a photographer based out of Charleston, South Carolina.

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15 Comments

I admire his temerity... if just for his independent confidence apart from Photoshop

Nice!

But the amount spent on tape could have bought them the Master Collection of CS5.5.5 :)
(I know it was not the point...)

 He wont use photoshop, but will use stupid camera tricks for behind the scenes videos?!
some people have to much time on their hands!

what camera tricks? playing the video backwards and speeding up the video?

After reading the NYT story I better understand what the intent was.  It is not doing something that could be doen in Photoshop but rather the act of doing.

It is a bit interesting to see them straighten out the final image though.  Doesn't that count as photoshop?

I think they just adjusted the camera angle at the end with no photoshop but I could be wrong. I watched that part a few times and if you watch the paint on the gym floor at the bottom it seems as if they move the camera to the left. I think it's a cool art project and made a cool video none the less. I'm sure this will get a lot of views where as the image/copy in photoshop wouldn't have. So maybe they win after all. 

As they say, why do it the easy way when you can do it the hard way ;)

I believe it now: Photoshop saves you time and money! :D

But isn't it rather cool that they do something in real life that probably first was done with Photoshop. How many pictures of letters like this, or other superimposed things, was even tried before Photoshop sort of gave the idea of the concept?

Goterpic,  I'm not sure how old you are, but there has been graphic design for hundreds of years before photoshop....

Hi,

I am old enough to know about graphic design, even though i haven't been around for hundred of years, and I even know that once film with only black and white was common.  :-)

I choose to belive that you understood what I meant...

The point is that he got the job for doing it in that way... NYTimes hired a seasoned Mr. Doyle to do the job, not an arrogant noob photographer that could say "I can do that with photoshop"

yeah but, i can do everything with photoshop. quicker and cheaper

wow, you must have a lot of work.