Revenge is sweet.
So how could I get redemption after that obviously photoshopped failure? I needed to make sure my friend would never find out that something I photoshopped was not a real image. This way, I figured, we would be 1:1. She ridiculed me for something that I spent too long on and I would ridicule her for not realizing another image I spent too long on was photoshopped. If I hadn't fooled her by photoshopping a shirt onto a random model, I figured the best way to get redemption would be to photoshop a shirt/top onto a DIFFERENT model. This plan did not go entirely as envisioned. First of all, I chose a sweater from a photo that just looked like a sweater on a hook. I had to first crop/erase parts of the image that made it clear the item was being sold, and then I had to add in a LOT of shading to make sure the sweater didn't just look pasted onto her body. I asked many of my artsy friends and even my House advisors for help, and yet most of them told me it looked like it was done by an AI that had no idea how shading worked. This was not great. Clearly, I needed to step up my game if I was to fool the most infallible of creatures... the human mind (obviously a joke, humans can be very stupid). So I invented something that has most definitely never been done before: the guinea pig. The concept of the guinea pig is simple. If your goal is to test something (no matter how silly) on somebody else, you must first test OTHER, less important people (to the mission obviously, not in general). This part of the plan went remarkably well. I first started asking people what they thought of the sweater, pretending like I was genuinely considering buying it (it cost $90 so obviously I wasn't actually going to). This plan tricked a lot of people. They were all like "wow that's such a nice sweater," and a few were genuinely disappointed when I told them it was photoshopped. I got a lot of really good feedback this way, and at one point was copying and pasting parts of the sweater into like TWENTY DIFFERENT LAYERS because I had not yet learned how to merge layers. ._. Then came the ultimate test. Would my friend believe that the image was photoshopped? When last period came around (yes I'd spent practically the entire school day obsessing over this), I anxiously awaited her arrival. I pulled out my phone, showing her what looked just like a photo I had saved. In reality, it was the end-all be-all moment. I asked her "what do you think of this sweater?" and she responded "yeah it's nice I guess." I counted this as victory. Once I told her it was photoshopped, her reaction was only "oh, really?" and she then proceeded to tell me she did not actually like the sweater and thought I was just testing her. So I figured we were 1:1.