My Picture that Lies

In my picture that lies, I combined a picture of a UFO and a picture of an explosion, creating the illusion of an alien attack. I chose to do this because there are a lot of fake alien-related pictures in circulation, and I wanted to see how easy it would be to make one myself with Photoshop. Both of the pictures that I used came from flickr.com. I manipulated my picture by first removing the UFO from a previously created UFO picture. I then inserted the UFO into the picture of an explosion. I used the clone stamp tool in Photoshop to add some clouds to where I inserted the UFO in the explosion picture. I also used the clone stamp tool to make the explosion look larger, and to cover up an object that was on the ground in the original picture. In Photoshop, I created adjustment layers that turned the edited picture black and white and darkened it, making the UFO look more realistic. I manipulated the pictures in this manner to make a realistic looking scene of a UFO flying above a giant explosion, implying that aliens are attacking earth. The manipulation I created is not harmful in and of itself. Really it is just a product of me having some fun on Photoshop, and it does not harm anyone else. However, if I tried to convince people that this picture is in fact real, then it would become harmful. In that case I would be lying and trying to portray a fictional event as real.