I mentioned this several times that I like artificial pictures as well. What I mean by this is that I sometimes like to give a picture a painted type of vibe, or I sometimes also refer to it as images that look like they were made for adventure video games. Ironically, to get there you don’t have to increase the quality, in a way you actually have to degrade the quality of the image. It’s just a matter of how you want to go, sometimes it’s really cool to completely go DOS (referring to the old DOS games type of graphic), other times it’s pretty cool to just do it partly and preserved a bit of photo quality.

By the way, if you wonder where I got the idea to actually degrade some photos instead of improving them, I probably played way too many games back then when I was a kid sitting in front of an Amiga computer. There was for example the game Lost Patrol, and the developer scanned digitized Vietnam footage and hand-drawn images. And since both, developer and gamers had no super computers or modern software like today, photorealism was still absent. Another example would be the old Alone in the Dark trilogy, although in this case they didn’t scan photos but drew digital images. Other examples would be point-and-click adventure games and quite a lot of other things from that time.

Talking about my own images, that’s probably where I got the idea from. I don’t always do it, but I especially do it with images that have way too many issues or with images that are boring. Because then I do sometimes decide to make the photo look artificial. And then again, I am just inspired by these old games but that doesn’t mean that I completely try to achieve the same. As said, it’s rather about giving a photo some kind of digitalized vibe. Because I personally like it a lot. So, most of the time it’s a mix of both, artificiality and photorealism.

You can see two examples here and here where I went nuts and made the photos look like they came straight out of an old computer game. Or the previously mentioned mix like here or here. Or with photorealism well-preserved as shown here and here. I personally think that it doesn’t always have to look real, I absolutely like to play with unnatural settings. But enough talked, at the end I want to show you new picture where I went more for the unnatural or drawn look…