All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Have you seen the picture with the "tourist guy" standing atop the World Trade Center with a jetliner heading straight for him? Or the one where Sesame Street's Bert is peeking over Osama bin Laden's shoulder? How about Jennifer Lopez looking really, really fat?
There was a time when manipulating photographs was considered mean-spirited trickery aimed at deceiving a gullible, technically challenged public. Certainly, if a respected news agency were caught doing it today, public outrage would ensue.
But doctoring images -- or Photoshopping, as its practitioners call it -- is a booming online pastime for hobbyists and graphic designers whose altered documents have taken up residence in the popular imagination alongside political cartoons and satirical text, like that published by The Onion.
This growing trend has been helped along by a handful of nascent websites dedicated to transforming the mundane imagery of news and entertainment into visual puns, satirical commentary and political expression.
On Fark.com, a morning invitation to doctor Topp's new Enduring Freedom trading cards resulted in dozens of altered images, posted onto the site's message boards by mid-afternoon.
Photoshopping is a regular activity on Fark, and one of its most popular features. Farkers typically Photoshop an image a day, and visitors to the site are encouraged to vote for their favorites.
Similarly, the London-based site B3ta.com hosts a weekly image-manipulation contest.
Politics are popular fodder, as are celebrities and films. The infamous WTC Tourist of Death as well as Austin Powers' Mini-Me are recurring motifs, repeatedly integrated into images and posted for amusement's sake.
Avi Muchnick, founder of The Satyr, which syndicates Onion-like stories and altered images to college newspaper websites, set up a separate site, Worth1000.com, just to handle Photoshopped images. In addition to publishing these photos (his own and outside submissions), Muchnick has created a searchable database of royalty-free images to feed the growing demand.
Dean Webb, whose website FatLaneOnline features plumped-up images of the thin and famous, says he got 400,000 pageviews in October, a number that's grown steadily since he launched the site in March.
After a small item about Fark.com ran in the October issue of Playboy, hits jumped from 3.6 million in September to 5.75 million in October. Muchnick's site gets between 150 and 200 new registered users each week. The file-swapping site FilePile has grown so popular it's exceeded its bandwidth and is no longer accepting new registrants.
It's not difficult to see why image manipulation is growing in popularity. Faster Web connections at home and work make for quick, easy image posting and viewing. With increasing numbers of people buying digital cameras, image-manipulation software is becoming more commonplace. Adobe has released Photoshop Elements, a simplified "prosumer" version of its popular Photoshop program, presumably to meet demand from these new image editors.
TV has abstained from jokes following the Sept. 11 attacks, so those seeking a humorous outlet for their feelings have had to find it online. Doctored images of political figures -- George W. Bush and bin Laden, especially -- are so plentiful they have their own category on About.com.
Photoshopping practitioners, for their part, proffer a variety of explanations for their hobby's popularity.
Rob Manuel, who is among the group of designers behind B3ta, blames boredom among Web designers who have been forced to take on dull corporate work during the economic downturn.
"They know they're doing really crappy stuff. We're trying to give people a playground to do fun stuff," Manuel said.
"I think it's a way of expression that people don't necessarily get a chance to do. I can't draw worth a crap. A lot of people can't do writing either," explained Drew Curtis, Fark's founder. Photoshop, he said, gives people an easy and creative way to express themselves online.
For Webb, doctoring images is a way to respond to society's obsession with physical perfection.
"Some people can see a message. Myself, I do it because it's fun and because I like to take these pictures of celebrities, stand them on their head, and satirize what I see to be a trend in society that I'm not really fond of: that people need to change themselves to be beautiful," Webb said.
Muchnick adds that people shouldn't underestimate the allure of perpetrating a really good joke.
"That picture of the World Trade Center man: People love hoaxes like that and love being able to create the hoax themselves. That sort of thing really takes off when you have the power to create that and send it around to your friends," Muchnick said.
Not everyone is laughing. In the days and weeks following Sept. 11, page views quadrupled at the Center for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal website, which posts information debunking hoaxes. A large percentage of visitors were inquiring about the Tourist of Death image.
"We got literally hundreds, if not a thousand, of e-mails about that particular photograph," said Kevin Christopher, public relations director for CSICOP. "It overloaded the site, and we actually lost parts of the records of visitors to the site."
"Given the things that people have to worry about, to have these idiotic hoaxes adding to that, that's detrimental and I don't think it's right. I wish I knew who these people were. They definitely deserve to be reprimanded in some way," Christopher said.
But on Fark, B3ta and elsewhere, the proliferation of doctored pictures shows no sign of abating.
"People just like amusing their friends, really," says B3ta's Manuel. "That's what a lot of the Internet is about, taking private jokes to a larger audience."
