Adobe and Reddit have joined forces once again for PSBattles Live – a part-comedy, part-competition livestream where the best photo editors fight it out to create the funniest images.
This year's competition started on 17 October and runs for a week. Every day from 12:00 PT / 20:00 GMT, Reddit will host a livestream of the teams in the tournament, followed by a Reddit live show presenting the best Photoshop creations of the day. Using some of the best photo editing software available such as Photoshop, teams are asked to manipulate an image provided by the moderators and create a picture that is either funny or just plain weird.
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The competition was born out of the decade-long success of the Reddit community r/photoshopbattles. It has more than 17 million members who love nothing more than to turn a normal picture into something bizarre using photo editing software. The popular subreddit not only shows off their artistic abilities but also people's individual take on creative comedy. This year is the first year subreddit r/PSBattleLive has run a competition and so far, with more than 7,500 people battling to win, it's been a popular virtual event.
The relationship between Reddit and Adobe blossomed in 2019 through the subreddit, r/Layer. It was the largest real-time online art installation to ever have existed and over the course of 5 days, more than 85,000 layers were contributed to a collective canvas. A total of 111,000 hours were sent by Reddit users in creating the digital artwork and more than 1.8 million votes were cast for the winner. Today more than 191,000 have made layers for Season 2 of the event, which is also in association with Adobe.
The competition is open to any Reddit user who wants to take part. Every day, moderators will post a photo for contestants to edit and the daily live streams will gather the best creations and encourage the reddit community to vote for their favorite.
Patti Harrison from Shrill hosts PSBattles Live and while there are no tangible prizes up for grids, winners can earn points, community awards and money-can't-buy internet glory – which, let’s be honest, is probably more important for the Reddit community anyway.
So far images have included pictures of squirrels edited onto a backdrop of the wild west, strapped to the front of a moving train and one even replaced Kate Winslet in the infamous Titanic scene at the bow of the ship. There has been famous movie covers replaced with animals such as “Catsommar” (a take on the psychological thriller Midsommar) and someone even made a cat into an Avatar in an edit of James Cameron’s film of the same name.
r/PSBattlesLive is not only a testament to people’s willingness to express their creativity but a celebration of a popular Reddit community. People’s ability to use a picture and create so many different images from it that are both funny and often, pretty convincing shows that people really do love a challenge.
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