Photoshop semiotocs

         The article prefaces itself with a lot of technical talk to set up a background for what it seemed to want to address. The author kept coming back to the idea of privacy in the classroom and the idea of reality in Photoshop. In terms of the concerns about privacy, most of it was directed at using pictures as documentation for educational researchers, and how Photoshop could possibly enable researches to get around the delicate subject of documenting minors and their artwork. Photoshop allows you to do things like alter or remove an image, so if say you scew a students face and make them visually anonymous, there might not be a legal problem in using them in research examples. To me, the more interesting idea was the concept of how to work with reality in the context of a classroom and Photoshop. Photoshop is a new technology, an specifically one with opportunities in the field of art. Because it works with photography, it asks us to take into account the uses of that art form. Traditionally, photography has been thought of as a means to capture an absolute image of reality-what is actual and seen. If, then, we consider the documentational purposes of the photograph and introduce this into the workings of Photoshop, we are posed with a question and options. What od we do with the knowledge and perception of reality once we have the capacity to alter? Photoshop allows the user the ability to perhaps make something "more" real, or more true to the reality that is felt. Photoshop allows teachers not only to get their students thinking about what reality is (in an aesthetic context or otherwise) but also acquaints them with a new technology skill and perception.

              The article also mentions the use of semiotics and hermeneutics, in relation to both art and Photoshop. In semiotics, it seems to ask how Photoshop alters social semiotics, or how we as a society understand symbols in visual form. Photoshop's alterings change images and the symbols they come with. If these are now the symbols we see prevailing in society, our understandings of these symbols and what they represent are changed. The hermeneutics, how we interpret these symbols, of this new batch of images should then be informed by the existence and capacities of Photoshop. It opens a new visual system of symbols and interpretations directly linked to the creator. This is not something entirely different from what various modes of art have done in the past- altered reality. Except that in the use of Photoshop the image is often a photograph, something that we associate with untampered visual truth. And this is far from the case. And so the use of Photoshop in the class room gives students the first hand experience and understanding of how an image and photograph is a lie, a lens that can help them better interpret their visual worlds.