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The Philosophy of Photoshop



Back in the old days, I was really into using Photoshop. Ever since I got the program in highschool, I’d spend countless hours experimenting like mad with filters and channels and gradients and drop shadows. I got pretty good at it over the years. I even got a Photoshop piece of mine into a national annual publication of science fiction illustration (check out the piece here, along with my other art). I got to such a point in using that program that I’d have dreams where I was zoomed in on an image 1600%, editing it pixel-by-pixel. It was, needless to say, a strange time in my life.

If you’re not familiar with Photoshop, the basic principle of working with it can be boiled down to something called raster graphics (also called bitmap). Raster graphics consist of pixels, little tiny bits of color. When you’re zoomed in really close, they look like little squares. When you’re looking at a normal magnification, the squares bleed together (if done properly) and it just looks like a photo. The most popular web graphics format JPEG (or .jpg), the same one your digital camera probably saves photos in, is a great example of raster graphics hard at work.

Photoshop is more than being just a graphics editing program though; it’s a style of thinking, a way of solving problems. The program is so flexible that any task demanded of it can be completed in any number of different ways. High-level Photoshop use exercises your ability to analyze a graphic situation, breaking it down into component stages to achieve your desired results. It also relies to an interesting degree on experimentation, and chance occurences, all of which bleed together to help you achieve your goal.

I also taught Photoshop for a couple years, so I’m keenly aware of the rather daunting facade thrown up against new users. It’s one thing to teach people the tools and tweaks available, but it’s quite another to learn to “think Photoshop”. So when I finally started learning last year to use Adobe’s partner software package, Illustrator, I hit a wall. I kept trying to apply Photoshop problem-solving skills to an environment that was wholly unsuited for it. Illustrator works according to a completely different underlying concept. Whereas Photoshop is a raster graphics editing program, Illustrator uses something called vector graphics. Vector graphics are based in points and mathematical formulae, rather than grids of tiny colored dots.

This has two major implications in the world of computing. The most basic is file size. Photoshop files tend to be rather large, because they consist of usually multiple layers of raster color grids overlaid on top of one another. In order to save the graphic, color and positioning information must be stored for each and every dot. In Illustrator though, the only information that has to be stored is a handful of individual orienting points, and their mathematical relationship to one another. The best way to understand this might be with a graphic.

On the left we have typical raster graphics from Photoshop, and on the right we have a depiction of a vector graphic. The vector is made up of the solid red dots (11 in total), and they are saved in relation to one another. It makes for a much slimmer file size, but it has another wildly important implication as well. See how in the image on the left, it looks kind of jagged? The greater your magnification on a raster graphic, the worse that problem gets. Vector graphics however are scalable, they can be blown up to any size, or shrunk down to any size, and they retain their properties and their crispness no matter what.

Interesting, but so what, you’re probably asking. Why am I even talking about this? Simple. The different approaches of each of these two graphics programs tell the tale of Western philosophy in nutshell. If you were paying attention, you probably spotted the names of two Greek philosophers that I snuck into the above diagram: Aristotle and Plato. In case you’re a little rusty on your ancient philosophy, Plato’s big thing was this idea of “Ideal Forms”. From Wikipedia:

The fundamental idea is that knowledge gained through the senses is always confused and impure, true knowledge being acquired by the contemplative soul that turns away from the world. […] The soul alone can have knowledge of the Forms, the real essences of things, of which the world we see is but an imperfect copy.

In other words, Plato’s way of thinking is expressed rather beautifully in Adobe Illustrator, and it’s use of vector graphics. Vector graphics make use of the “real essence” of the shape, and contain a perfected form that can be scaled to any size without loss of accuracy. It uses Ideal Forms.

Aristotle on the other hand was more concerned with the world of the senses, or empiricism, and serves as the grounding for much of the modern philosophy behind the scientific method. His analyses generally consisted of collecting and categorizing objects according to their traits. In other words, he was arranging pixels or little bits into a grid. He was the philosophical forerunner to raster graphics as typified by Photoshop.

The history of the Western world in a lot of ways can be understood as a conversation between these two styles of thinking: the real and the ideal, the Aristotelian and the Platonic, matter and mind, idealism and pragmatism. Throughout history we’ve see religious, philosophical and cultural movements which strive towards one of these poles, and the resulting effects as culture swings back in the other direction. Fantastically, the two most powerful graphics editing programs of today continue this ancient conversation right in our midst. The most interesting aspect of all this though is that these two software packages are usually used in conjunction with one another by graphics professionals and amateurs alike. While some people might prefer one system over the other, they each have strengths and capacities of which the other is lacking. And with each new version of these programs, the two systems of thinking come closer and closer to fusing together. Progress towards this fusion may be an interesting thing to watch in the coming years. What will their union mean for our culture philosophically? Will we have finally solved the ancient dichotomy in an area that perhaps we weren’t expecting to?

Or have we already created philosophical fusions such as these? Maybe we’re just not paying attention to what things mean. Theologically Jesus Christ is supposed to be Fully God and Fully Man. Does that mean he is “Fully Illustrator” and “Fully Photoshop”, the ultimate union of the Platonic Ideal and the Aristotelian Real? What would it mean if we were able to solve this problem not only in our hearts, but in our computers?







2 Reader Responses

  1. Fell Says:
    August 2nd, 2005 at 4:50 pm

    I like how you threw this down. It is one of the things I want to be able to get across: being able to express these esoteric definitions through analogies. It’s something I was seeing in My Architect, about Louis I. Khan, which I recently watched, or can see in other texts, such as the aphorism that God is in the details.

    I think there have been very interesting looks at almost any field — from architecture to tea ceremonies to personal grooming to gardening. Perhaps certain acts offer a more “spiritual” experience than others, surfing over, say, mini-golf, but in any act that one finds oneself involved, there is always a door of perception that can open and offer personal truths and insight into the actions. Concentration upon any action, if the concentration is adequate, may bring about something akin to an enlightened approach to the activity.

    The above are activities. Something one needs to partake in to gain a personal knowledge of, an experience of, a wisdom thereof. This would be nearly impossible to expain in a book on something like architecture or surfing, but comes with the learned experiences of personally doing something until it becomes natural… and then moving into a mastery of it.

    Some of the concepts I am playing around with — dealing with the terms “occult” and “design” — are that they are abstractions dealing with information:

    The word occult comes from Latin occultus (hidden), referring to the ‘knowledge of the secret’ or ‘knowledge of the hidden’ and often meaning ‘knowledge of the supernatural’, as opposed to ‘knowledge of the visible’ or ‘knowledge of the measurable’, usually referred to as science. The modern term’s meaning is often imprecisely translated and used as a term for ’secret knowledge’ or ‘hidden knowledge’, in the sense of meaning ‘knowledge meant only for certain people’ or ‘knowledge that must be kept hidden’. For most practicing occultists, however, it is simply the study of a deeper spiritual reality that cannot be understood using pure reason or material science. The ancient Greek term for occult is esoteric.

    So it seems that the occult implies a working knowledge? Going back to the Photoshop comparison, I can see Photoshop as a physical manipulation of reality. Working with what you have right in front of you. Being able to zoom in to the nth degree (pixels = molecules) of the “reality” of a raster/bitmap image.

    Illustrator is interesting because you never get to see the math that is intrinsic mathematics that make up all the colours, angles, strokes, and other details of a vector image. You are given tools to bend, warp, and shape these elements, but essentially we’re never privy to the code behind the curtain.

    Even in Photoshop you can control the colour values using five different colour models (HSB, RGB, CMYK, Lab, hexidecimal), and can do any bloody thing you want to that particular pixel, much like when IBM arranged those atoms into their logo. But, in reality, designers (sorcers? scientists?) work with pixels on a grand scale. This is generally how scientists work with environments, organisms, et cetera.

    Illustrator is harder to make synonomous with any trade, it’s more like music, art, and poetry. You have the tools, but partial abstraction and partial theory that comes into play when creating these vector images. This reminds me of something akin more to the occult.

    The colour spaces are an interesting anology, too. When working in an RGB colour space, you have access to a wider variety of colours than in the others. More than discernible by the human eye, in fact. However, the RGB colour space works only on CRT monitors capable of displaying that many technical colours. One must change the working colour space to CMYK to go to print. This reminds me a lot of the applications of science. This one model to approach this problem will yield these results, but not those. Another model may lead to such and such an outcome, but the original is now different.

    The occult is more like Illustrator because you never get to understand the math behind the images you create. It’s this invisible language, beyond the capacities of English (or whichever). Interestingly, we have mathematicians that have, over the centuries, organised themselves and really carved out a process for alternative thinking and communication via mathematics and all that it engenders.

    The two differences also make me think of the whole particle versus wave debate that was cropping up in quantum physics. Pixels versus points. Both are ways to look at reality, but at their core one stops with the manifest and the other extends into infinity.

    Going back into the whole analogy thing, whereas the above examples such as bonsai trees and surfing are activities in which we partake, ways of approaching certain issues from so-called design or occult perspectives are theoretical constructs. They are ways of training a mind to interact with its environemnts in new ways, without really partaking in an activity. Perhaps Gnostic in the context that before there was only nature our perception thereof, and after design or the occult, there is now the individuals perception and the knowledge necessary to enact their will upon this environment now. They are tools of information, which shapes the user into someone who can interact and make more personalised their illusions.

    The observation of limitation
    The intuitive knowledge of potential beyond limitation
    The experience of transcending limitation into potential

    People have their own common perceptions and dispositions towards design and the occult. But at the root here, we have two systems that are about the change and betterment of reality around us. Or simply the learning of, which might compare the occult more towards artistically oriented design and art. From the observation of limitation that the system provides, the designer takes a an approach of analysis, evaluation, and implements abstract tools and methods of common sense to allow for the problem to be handled more effectively or all but not removing the initial perception of challenge altogether. That “there is always a better way,” to “keep it simple, stupid,” or to “make something as simple as possible, but no simpler”… these are design maxims.

    A lot of these perceptions can be found echoed throughout many occult posts dealing with human perception, comprehension, and approaches to magic. I am not sure if this can be applied to conspiracy theory or not.

    Okay, I’m done. I just needed to get some of this out, on your blog, mine, or someone elses. It helps me to organise my thoughts.

  2. Fell Says:
    August 2nd, 2005 at 5:01 pm

    As I made mention of in another post on my blog, I think the thing here that seperates the designer from the artist is ego. The designer works for the betterment of the client, the job, the building, the communication, the idea, the brand, et al. The artist works for the self-involved betterment (or to their own detriment, depending on their disposition, I suppose) of themselves, or for their own reasons, at least.

    Here is where I am seeing the schism in the occult. And this may also tie into conspiracy theory…

    What if the egos of those involved in the esoteric, not just the occult field as we deem it today, are being overly affected by their desires, their perspectives on how or what things should be. Granting them a certain amount of power over reality, and then there is a play to mould it to their will. Just as an amazing musician or artist can lose themselves to their fame if they’re popular with the masses, this brings on other issues: namely, a) if one is an idol or icon, then you begin to be affected by the opinions and perspectives of those doing the idolising; and b), this really begins to bring up issues of Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince.

    The artist can very easily become as much a victim of her or his fans, they become public domain. Not just in analogy, but in a very real sense society begins to implicitly apply its collective will upon the artist. The designer, however, must work along her or his ego and create “outside of themselves” in order to solve a problem. They are creative problem solvers.

    Back to the occult and magic, here we see the seperation of the sorcerer and the mystic, perhaps? We all know the egos that can get involved in the occult. All the name calling and opinions. It is not much different than Hollywood or high school. But can we approach the occult from that of design. One of problem solving? Is this possible for something along the lines of what we call religion? The process of “transcending limitation into potential.”



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