648: Fall Foliage
| Fall Foliage |
 Title text: And I could replace you with older pictures of you, from back when you looked happy. |
Explanation
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. (Meanwhile, a blue sky would become green or yellow, though.) 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.
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.
Transcript
- [Cueball and Megan are standing on a cliff overlooking a forest of gorgeous orange foliage. She's holding up a camera, and he has the case.]
- 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.
- click
add a comment! ⋅ add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅ 
refresh comments!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)
- Mentioning both words should be enough — keep it simple because everybody will understand. --Dgbrt (talk) 20:44, 19 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)
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.
