331: Photoshops
| Photoshops |
 Title text: When I look into your eyes, I see JPEG artifacts. I can tell by the pixels that we're wrong for each other. |
Explanation
This whole comic including the title text are a pun on the then-popular internet meme "Looks Shopped".
Adobe Photoshop is a popular image manipulation tool. It is used to manipulate photographic images and for drawing. Of course, Photoshop and similar tools like Paint Shop Pro can only be used for imagery, not for real life objects.
The title text contains the second part of the internet meme, the complete text is: "THIS LOOKS SHOPPED / I CAN TELL FROM SOME OF THE PIXELS AND FROM SEEING QUITE A FEW SHOPS IN MY TIME."
Quite a few interesting images have been uncovered as "shopped", where for examples shadows are in the wrong direction, extra hands appear, movie stars are made thinner, wrinkles or spots removed and objects added or removed. This of course triggered the start of the meme.
JPEG is an image compression algorithm that works by finding frequencies in blocks of 8x8 pixels and saving that instead of the original pixels. This works remarkably well, but sometimes leaves artifacts that can be seen when zooming in enough. The iris of an eye contains all kinds of odd colored spots - and there's not a JPEG algorithm in sight.
Transcript
- [A woman holds a sword while a man looks on]
- Text: My hobby: Insisting that real-life objects are photoshopped.
- Woman: This sabre is a 19th-century family heirloom.
- Man: It looks photoshopped.
- Woman: Huh?
- Man: Yeah, the reflections are all wrong. Definitely photoshopped.
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