Harry P.

Misrepresenting the product and altering reality have been part of advertising since... forever. Long before Photoshop existed...

Remember, if you know the source of the photo, don't tell us here! Finished early because I won't be around the computer tomorrow morning, so I'm posting the answer tonight. It's REAL!

Pretty cool!

Yes.

Exactly! If you post a photo of your work here, but you've lightened the photo, or fixed the contrast, or sharpened the image, that's fine. You have only made the photo better. But if you post a photo of your work here, and you have altered the model digitally to fix flaws in your model, then you have falsely made your model better, and that is a misrepresentation of your work. Or in plain English, a lie. Same thing if you enter a photo contest with a retouched photo of your model. That's cheating, plain and simple.

I saw a white Jaguar F-type in the Menards parking lot this afternoon. Wow, what a beautiful car!

You're right on the custom bumpers... they are shaped differently than the stock ones. The kit is wrong on the taillights, though. The embossed rings around the taillights/turn signals on the model (what are supposed to be the chrome bezels) actually intersect on the model. On the real car there is a gap between the taillights and turn signals. The kit taillights are also way too big. None of that is your fault, of course... it's bad kit design.

Looks like the "custom" bumpers are the stock bumpers mounted upside-down!

http://www.gypsylarry.com/2010/12/horseshoe-beach/

We can only hope so. We work on the honor system here, but if someone wants to scam us, they will.

We go by the honor system here. We assume that people who post photos of their work haven't, uh... "enhanced" their work digitally. But if they have, there's nothing we can do about it. If people want to scam us, they will. But most wouldn't do that... that's the good news!

Yes, you can manipulate an existing image with Photoshop to fool people. But as far as plowboy's comment that you don't really create art in Photoshop... that Photoshop somehow does it "for you" by clicking a few buttons... that's ridiculous. Below is an illustration I created from scratch in Photoshop, using the various tools that PS has. My "inspiration" was the photo on the left, but I can guarantee you that my illustration was "drawn" or "painted" or whatever word you want to use, 100% by me. Photoshop has no magic button that says "Elvis face" or "acoustic guitar" or anything like that. Photoshop lets you create shapes and tones and colors and shading like a brush and paint allows you to create the same things... only in a different way. Photoshop isn't like one of those keyboards with built-in "music" that you only have to press a button to play. Using Photoshop, you can create an illustration... Photoshop can't create the illustration for you, any more than a paintbrush can create a painting for you.

That's an example of someone who isn't very clever. Just cloning one area and pasting it somewhere else is a sure sign of a person who wasn't thinking.

That is so wrong I don't even know where to start. That's like saying, you didn't paint that picture... the brush painted it for you. Or, you didn't write that novel... the keyboard wrote it for you. The computer doesn't do anything "for you." A computer can't create an image on its own, just like a paintbrush can't paint a picture by itself. (I'm talking about creating an image in Photoshop from scratch, not retouching existing images, which is a different thing). The paintbrush (and the computer) needs input from the person using it. The computer is a device that allows you to run software, like Photoshop. Photoshop isn't "the computer," it's Photoshop. It's like an electronic toolbox full of electronic pencils, brushes, erasers, etc. And Photoshop can only do what (and how) you tell it to do. Photoshop can't create an illustration by itself. There is no "button" to push that creates instant art. What you have are tools that you can select and use, just like in "real life" where you decide whether you want to use a pencil or a paintbrush or an eraser or whatever. If I take an airbrush and spray paint onto illustration board, that takes the same type of skill as taking the airbrush tool in Photoshop and "spraying" the "paint" onto your "artboard." Photoshop can't guide your hand, or tell you how much to spray, or where to spray it. You have to make those decisions, Photoshop doesn't think for you. I used to do everything by hand, before Photoshop existed. Now I do it all electronically, but it still takes the same talents and skills. If you can only draw a stick figure with a pencil, you're not going to be able to draw any better using Photoshop. There is no "magic" to Photoshop.

What tells you it's been Photoshopped?

Because you see the original. If you had only seen the "after" you wouldn't know it had been Photoshopped.

Here's an example of a photo as submitted... and as it appeared in the magazine. This is pretty typical of what I get...

Actually the photos you provided (including the one I put on the cover) were Photoshopped by me. Virtually every photo that appears in the magazine has been Photoshopped to some extent. It can be as minimal as cropping the image to fit the "window" that is has to go into, sharpening the image and taking out any obvious junk, like a hair on the model, or dust specks. And almost every photo is color corrected to some extent. But it can go a lot further than that. You would be amazed at how bad some of the photos I get are... some of them spend quite some time in the Photoshop "operating room"... sometimes they are so dark that you can't see any detail, or the color balance is way off, or both. Some photos are so bad that even after I apply as many PS tricks as I know, the image is still "iffy," but I have to go with it regardless, because it's all I have. Most people who submit stuff to the mag are not professional photographers (or even decent amateur photographers)... I know that, so Photoshopping the images is a normal part of the job. There are a handful of people who are "pros," and submit photos that usually take only very minimal work (Tim Boyd and Bill Coulter come to mind, but there are others, too). Sometimes the photo itself is fine, but I want the model on a different background to fit a particular layout design, so I'll take out the existing background, or put in a different background. Sometimes after taking out a background, I'll go in and create a new shadow under the model so it looks like it's actually sitting on a surface. Sometimes I will take two separate photos, take the models out of each photo and "pose" the two models together in a new photo and create a new background, so that the models appear to be side by side and in the same photo. Those are just a few examples of what I do to the photos you see in the magazine. And yes, sometimes I fix a ragged foil line or a small painted detail if the builder was a little messy. But that's pretty rare; most of the time if there are imperfections in the model, I leave them alone. The good news is that in the vast majority of photos, the models themselves don't need any touch-ups aside from removing dust specks. I've never had to straighten a bumper or move a wheel or anything like that. Basically, the model you see is the model as it appears in real life.

Not if the person doing the Photoshopping knows what they're doing. I don't think I've ever seen an image posted here that was obviously (meaning ham-handedly) Photoshopped. I mean, I know people post obviously Photoshopped images that they found online, like the shortened cars and crazy donks and such... but as far as posting their own work, I've never seen it. I think doing the stuff you mentioned (color balance, sharpening the photo, fixing the contrast, etc.) is fine. But once you start actually manipulating the model, that's cheating.

How do you know?

You mean presented here "Under Glass?" That would be dishonest.

Decals!

Not a fan of giant wheels, but otherwise absolutely beautiful! When I was a little kid, the guy across the alley had one of these, black. He washed and waxed that car every weekend. It was spectacular. I still remember that car to this day...

I blame the internet...