Cloning

This is not a criticism so much as an observation: I've found that being a designer and frequent image-fiddler-with-Photoshop makes you more aware of other people's fiddling. Here's a case in point. I thoroughly enjoyed Gordon Grice's The Book of Deadly Animals, a sardonic compendium of all the kinds of animals that can and have maimed and killed human beings in various ways. (Representative sentence, regarding the brown bear: "Few animals can ruin a human body so thoroughly.")

The cover of the US Penguin paperback makes use of a tremendous photo, 'The Smile of the Hyena' by Laurent Baheux.

But something about the cover bugged me, and I realised that the photo had been retouched slightly clumsily, presumably to make it fit the cover dimensions, with evidence of Photoshop's clone tool being used to fill in the gaps, resulting in an area around the hyena's neck and shoulders where the same bit of photo is used again and and again and again.

You can see this sort of thing all over the place these days, on print ads, product packaging and magazine covers and the like, and once you start seeing it, it's very distracting. So really, I'm doing you no favours by pointing it out.