Among the Best Photoshop Tutorials Ever (Cell Phone Art)

Kimowan's "Make Face in the hole look perfect"

Last week I was posting few links on facebook when I came across Kimowan's new portrait. I did a double take, because at first it looked like a real 1970's type yearbook photo of an African-American guy with glasses. Was this one of Kimowan's long lost brothers, maybe separated at birth? The resemblence was unmistakable. And another looked like one of my stoner buddies from high school, yet hey, wait a minute, hold that doobie, is that Kimowan? Ha! Anyway, it had me chuckling for a bit. Like Kimowan mentioned, it's an Internet site called Yearbook Yourself, with a link from facebook (under the just for fun- totally pointless heading type), so it's kind of a phenomenon of the moment there.

What really struck me was how Kimowan's Make face in the hole look perfect tutorial stood out from the crowd. His looked real, whereas just about all the others had a decidedly fake look about them. Of course Kimowan being who he is, shared his photoshop technique. It's cool how easy he made it. I've found that a lot of photoshop tutorials posted around the net are unnecessarily difficult and full of techno-gibberish. His was a cool high/low tech thing that you hardly see. A lot of photographers have been making some very interesting work with their cell phones, and this falls in that category too, even as edited. I noticed that the Maryland Contemporary Museum claimed to be the first to exhibit Cell Phone art in 2007, but I seem to recall Pedro Meyer's ever venerable Zone Zero showing Cell Phone photographs long before that (does anyone have a link for the Zone Zero Cell Phone exhibition? I can't seem to find it).

What makes Kimowan's among the best photoshop tutorials ever is both how believable he made the image look and how easy he made it for the viewer, especially when you consider that it was prep work for an app that churns out what are usually unexpected and very uneven results.

Anyway, this was a fun site, and yet is still about what's happening out there at this moment, which is what made it interesting too.