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Photoshop contest

online game

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionDec 24, 2025
Entity authorityQ2176276
Source-derived summary

A Photoshop contest, or sometimes Photoshop battle (often abbreviated to PS Battle), is an online game, in which a website or user of an Internet forum will post a starting image — usually a photograph — and ask others to manipulate the image using some graphics editing software, usually Adobe Photoshop, however other editors are commonly allowed, such as Corel Photo-Paint, GIMP, PaintShop Pro, Paint.NET or even Microsoft Paint. People can also use video editing software to create these images, such as Adobe Premiere Pro, Kdenlive, OpenShot, or NCH VideoPad.

While Photoshop is the industry standard image editing program, Adobe Systems, the publisher of Photoshop, discourages use of "Photoshop" to refer to anything other than their photo editing software, to prevent their trademark from becoming generic.

Humor

A large part of the humor in many of these contests involves the use of internet memes.

Such contests have recently seen increasing participation on many blogs and forums. The popular internet community Reddit has a community called r/photoshopbattles devoted to the contests.

A more "underground" variety of these image manipulation jokes involves the blending of celebrity faces with nude or pornographic images commonly known as fake nudes, often combined with references to movies, music, magazines and other forms of related popular culture.

Photoshop tennis

Photoshop tennis (also known as Photoshop Pong or Photoshop battle (similar in its function to a "DJ battle" or "rap battle" in hip hop music) is a game played through sequential alternating (photoshopping) of an image. Photoshop tennis originated in graphics-related internet forums in the late-1990s/early-2000s, and shares an earlier history with online image games such as SITO's "PANIC" (started January, 1994). The game was made popular by art director Jim Coudal in 2001 as "Photoshop Tennis".

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Photoshop contest” is online game. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Photoshop, contest and online, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1994, 2001—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Photoshop, contest and online is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “online game” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 24, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q2176276. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1994 and 2001.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Photoshop contest”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Photoshop contest primary sources, Photoshop contest archive and Photoshop research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Photoshop contest”?
  2. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
  3. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Photoshop contest” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.