After a month spent exploring some of the world's most wondrous places, Kotaku editor-in-chief Stephen Totilo returns to work tomorrow. I can think of no greater homecoming present than to have his memories forever preserved in slightly bastardized form by our army of Photoshop savvy readers.
Since I've taken up the mantle of weekend editor, people often ask how I come up with the themes for the weekly Photoshop contest. Most of the time inspiration comes from a powerful image or story we've posted on the site earlier in the week. Sometimes I go with a holiday theme. And on extremely rare occasions, Luke Plunkett emails me a link to some travel photos of our boss with the subject line "PHOTOSHOP CONTEST" in all caps.
And thus was Luke Plunkett implicated.
In all seriousness, these are a couple of gorgeous images. I'm a little bit jealous. I could never scuba dive. I love the water, but my mind would be too busy screaming "Your entire air supply is strapped to your back!" for me to enjoy anything other than a lovely panic.
And look how happy he is!
Such joy, even with whatever the hell that thing is getting all up in the camera. A joy I'm sure will be replicated when he checks the site this morning and discovers I've posted pictures of him scuba diving and asked you all to modify them.
Beautiful memories, but could they be even more beautiful? What did Totilo see, under the sea? Would he have had as much fun in space? How close was he to Rapture? Where was The Little Mermaid when this was all going down? Have any of you seen Nemo? And no, really — what the hell is that fish thing?
The answer to all this and more in this week's Kotaku Photoshop Contest.
Not sure how to upload images? Follow these simple steps and you'll soon be uploading pictures to the internet like a pro.
1. Create your 'Shop and save it to your desktop.
2. Go to the bottom of this post
3. This brings up a comment window. Click
4. This brings up Click "Choose file" if you're uploading your 'shop from your desktop
5. Alternatively, you can upload the 'Shop to a free image hosting service. I suggest imgur. Then paste the image's URL into the field that says "Image URL." Note: this must be the URL of the image itself, not the page where it is displayed. That means the URL ends in .jpg, .gif, .png, whatever.
6. Add editorial commentary and hit submit and your image will load. If it doesn't, upload the image to imgur and paste the image URL as a comment. I promise I will look at it.
7. Large-size images may not upload properly, though we have seen some big-ass animated .gifs upwards of 5 MB. If you're still having trouble uploading the image, try to keep its longest dimension (horizontal or vertical) under 1000 pixels, or the whole thing under 2 MB.
LET'S DO THIS IN ALL CAPS.
To contact the author of this post, write to fahey@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @bunnyspatial.