648: Fall Foliage

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Fall Foliage
And I could replace you with older pictures of you, from back when you looked happy.
Title text: And I could replace you with older pictures of you, from back when you looked happy.

Explanation[edit]

Cueball and Megan have driven some distance from home, and Megan enjoys the pastime of leaf peeping, happily taking photographs of the beautiful fall or autumn foliage. Cueball points out that they could've stayed home and used Photoshop to alter pictures they've already taken, saving themselves the trouble of going on the trip. The hue control in such image editing programs shifts the colors around the spectrum without altering the brightness; the green leaves in a summer picture could then easily be shifted to yellow or red.

Megan simply shushes him in the strip, but the title text is implied to be Megan's retort, saying that Cueball used to be a happier person, and if he will continue being like this, she would prefer to see him in old pictures rather than living with him. Or it could be that Cueball is making a response to the shush as he seems to be the more technologically inclined and more annoyed.

The comic is also showing how, because of technology, many people are not as "happy" as they once were. Instead of appreciating natural beauty, Cueball simply wishes to "replicate" the experience by using Photoshop; unfortunately, this would deprive him of both the experience of beautiful fall leaves and a shared intimacy with Megan.

See also 1314: Photos about people taking pictures and White Hat complaining. Later in 1719: Superzoom White Hat and Cueball again discusses photography, while in 2111: Opportunity Rover White Hat shares his anti-photography opinion again.

Transcript[edit]

[Cueball and Megan are standing on a cliff overlooking a forest of gorgeous orange foliage. The forest grows up a hill and behind and right of the forest there are is forest free hill and in the horizon two small mountain peaks rises up to the gray blue sky. Cueball is holding his camera down while Megan is holding her camera up taking a photo. As opposed to normal the text is written inside two speech bubbles with arrow ending pointing at the two. Also the sound of the camera is written inside a white area with small u shapes forming part of the frame for this sound.]
Cueball: Instead of driving all this way, we could've just taken our summer pictures and messed with the "hue" slider in Photoshop.
Megan: Hush.
Camera: Click


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Discussion

It's not so clear to me that it's Megan that makes the title comment about "replacing you with older pictures". When I first read it, I thought it's more like something that Cueball would have said, since he's so eager to "mess with Photoshop"... 77.254.185.80 13:28, 2 October 2013 (UTC)szeryf

Megan is the one who seems happy here, so I think that the existing discussion text is correct on this point. I think this comic is also a more general comment on real vs simulated experiences. For example, do you think it is more fulfilling to have a girlfriend, or to photoshop a girlfriend into existing pictures of you? 108.162.219.223 06:44, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Added an explanation of fall. Autumn is only weirdly called that in the US, the rest of the world won't know that. 141.101.98.53 18:20, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Uhh, ask a Chinese or a German like me, we are also part of the rest of the world outside the US. BTW: in German it's "Herbst", which is close to harvest. --Dgbrt (talk) 19:37, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
Clearly I meant the English speaking world. It's only used that way in American. Don't be pedantic. At a guess, if it wasn't for the autmun foliage in the comic, a significant proportion of British people would not have made the association between fall and autumn. 141.101.98.53 21:49, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
Mentioning both words should be enough — keep it simple because everybody will understand. --Dgbrt (talk) 20:44, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
Let's be honest here, given the huge amount of American media the English speaking world consumes there are probably very few people who don't know that "Fall" is Americanese for autumn. -Pennpenn 108.162.250.162 01:03, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

For those curious what the picture would actually look like with the hue shifted, here it is - when the trees are green (a 90-degree hue shift), the sky has a hint of purple, about the right shade for sunrise or sunset.