Photoshop contest

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Original painting "Leif Eriksson Discovers America" by Christian Krohg was subject for the Norwegian championship online manipulation contest.

This collage, titled "Strong Mead" is a Photoshopped mix of the picture above and different paintings by Salvador Dalí and qualified for the final.

A Photoshop contest, or sometimes photochop contest, 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 kind of graphics editing software, such as Photoshop, Corel Photopaint, The GIMP, Paint Shop Pro or for those posting on a work computer, Microsoft Paint.

The contest usually asks users to edit the picture in a humorous way, or according to a specific theme. The users then go away and edit the image to the requirements and post their results to the site. Once all the users have submitted their versions of the image, they vote on the quality of the other user's submissions. The user whose image receives the most votes wins.

A large part of the humor in many of these contests involves the use of clichés — often the result of a tremendous repetition of the joke from a funny image; so much so that the original joke is lost and using the cliché itself is the joke. Such clichéd pictures can often become internet phenomena. Here is a list of some of the most oft-used clichés:

Domo-kun
Admiral Ackbar, and his phrase "It's a trap!".
A tourist standing on the World Trade Center with a plane about to hit it.
An image of a disheveled James Brown.
An image which accompanied the politically incorrect joke "Arguing on the internet is like running in the Special Olympics. Even if you win, you're still retarded".
An image of a large man holding a large can of mustard, with his arm drenched in mustard.
An (often obscure) reference to goatse.cx.
All your base are belong to us.
The O rly owl.
The Preved bear — A bear from the modified John Lurie's watercolor Bear Surprise is placed into pictures, photographs and videos.
A picture with the captions "X is watching you poop."

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