By John Tustin
This is sort of an atypical article of mine. Usually I’ve only written about TV, Movies, and the occasional short story. However there is one thing I felt very compelled to write about, and that’s my history with photoshop. Very recently I had this kind of revitalization for my love of Adobe Photoshop, a love that has spanned about 6 years that has just only recently gotten reintroduced into my life. So I thought “This thing has been a hobby of mine for such a long time, I should write about it.” And that’s what I’m doing. I’m going to go into my history with the application, the revival of my interest in it, and what I’ve been doing with it recently.
Around 2012-2013 I was introduced to the ever popular YouTuber Pewdiepie by a kid on the bus. That day I went home and watched his videos and instantly became infatuated with his channel. To me he was hilarious, with him getting scared at horror games, adding commentary while playing games, and… well he played games and talked over them. That’s nothing special today, but back then it was something impressive to behold. However, one series of clips really popped out at me, and that was the video clips he would make using Adobe Photoshop. Those were the videos I liked the most, each day hoping that the next reel he’d upload would be another photoshopped one.
Unfortunately those videos were few and far between, but that made them ever so much more special. I wasn’t great at drawing, or ever had an art medium that really called out to me until I saw those videos. The format really just spoke to me, made me think that anybody can do it, that it just requires learning. From then on I was set on Photoshop. Now, Adobe Photoshop is really expensive, unnecessarily expensive. And I wasn’t the type of kid who was willing to shell out money he didn’t have, especially on a yearly subscription service. So through research I learned that there was a free official version of Photoshop called Photoshop CS6 and that is what I got.
Were my early works good? No. A lot of my early works consisted of me trying to make cartoon characters in real life: Putting a sailor suit on a duck, A hat and tie on a bear, and fish in shoes (shout out to anybody who knows which characters I’m talking about (although it isn’t that hard to figure out)). I also just searched up random images online and was just messing with the different tools and options I had, which was extremely fun for me.
Before I tell this part I must say that I totally, definitely, in no way condone piracy at all and that it is wrong (pretend I’m winking). Later on when I got my laptop and I could stop using the ancient family PC, I yearned for more up to date software so I “went sailing” and found Adobe Photoshop 2016. It utilized a file that you would put in a certain file destination in the application that changed the one week trial and extended to 1,000,000 days a.k.a essentially infinite use. Eventually somehow Adobe caught on to this exploit and shut down my account. This scared 13 year old me to death, being afraid that the cops would show up to my house and arrest me. Which of course they did not. So I reverted back to CS6.
For the next couple of years I would rarely use Photoshop, as the amount of ideas I had dwindled, as well as how good I was because I wasn’t getting any practice. But because of Quarantine I had some time to kinda get back into it, after finding a copy of Photoshop 2019 that didn’t utilize the trial exploit, but simply just worked. Every so often I would open it to try and work on something and probably delete it, cause I ended up hating it. Or I would use it to work on something for school or for other various things.
In fact I used Photoshop for the image I used for “Bizarre Beach” a previous article I wrote. And that kinda got me back in the groove. But, it wasn’t until the recent winter break that I really got back into it. With college applications being done, no winter break homework, and really no responsibilities, I found myself in a rare situation, I had time to myself. That alone wasn’t enough for me to get back into Photoshop though, I had a new source of inspiration and ideas, which was to edit photos of myself as well as my friends. (With their permission of course— I always ask someone before I make an edit of them).
Well, people really seemed to like it. And I started to post them to my Instagram which made me want to make more, which I did. I started making my own memes again as well (which is something I also did with CS6 and 2016, but didn’t mention it). It’s been a hell of a lot of fun, and I’m happy looking forward to what I can come up with next.
Again, I just like doing this for fun, it’s nothing serious. I just like making whatever I think is cool or funny to me. Because I feel like the majority aren’t “workplace appropriate” for this article, I’ll just attach some tame stuff below. It’s a shame I can’t show the more risqué stuff (Me posing with Jeffrey Epstein, or me at a party with Bill Cosby drinking out of a champagne glass (as a joke), as well as multiple images of my friends that I cannot even mention.
(NOTE: ALL IMAGES ABOVE PHOTOSHOPPED BY JOHN TUSTIN)