Photoshopping

The growing popularity of image manipulation has raised concern as to whether it allows for unrealistic images to be portrayed to the public. In her article "On Photography" (1977), Susan Sontag discusses the objectivity, or lack thereof, in photography, concluding that "photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored and tricked out". A practice widely used in the magazine industry, the use of Photoshop on an already subjective photograph, creates a constructed reality for the individual and it can become difficult to differentiate fact from fiction. With the potential to alter body image, debate continues as to whether manipulated images, particularly those in magazines, contribute to self-esteem issues in both men and women.
Photoshopping is slang for the digital editing of photos. The term originates from Adobe Photoshop, the image editor most commonly used by professionals for this purpose; however, other programs, such as Paint Shop Pro, Corel Photopaint, Paint.NET, or GIMP, may be used. Adobe Systems, the publisher of Adobe Photoshop, discourages use of the term "photoshop" as a verb out of concern that it may undermine the company's trademark. Despite this, photoshop is widely used as a verb, both colloquially and academically, to refer to retouching, compositing (or splicing), and color balancing carried out in the course of graphic design, commercial publishing, and image editing. In popular culture, the term photoshopping is sometimes associated with montages in the form of visual jokes, such as those published on the fark.com website and in MAD Magazine. Images may be propagated memetically via e-mail as humor or passed as actual news. An example of the latter category is "Helicopter Shark," which was widely circulated as a so-called "National Geographic Photo of the Year" and was later revealed to be a hoax.