Johner Institute · Photoshop · Image Retouching · Video
Turning Professor Christian Johner into a Swiss Politician
A Photoshop transformation created for a custom April Fool’s Day video for the Johner Institute in Konstanz.
The assignment was to transform Professor Christian Johner into a convincing fictional rising star of Swiss politics — while still leaving just enough of the original person underneath.
The Assignment
A deliberately convincing transformation
The Johner Institute commissioned the image treatment for a custom April Fool’s Day video featuring Professor Christian Johner in an unexpected new role: a rising Swiss politician.
The visual joke depended on the transformation being plausible. Rather than simply adding a few obvious effects, the portrait needed to read immediately as a different public persona while retaining the underlying photographic realism.
The result worked perhaps a little too well: according to the feedback I received, many viewers initially failed to recognize Professor Johner.
Image Making
Photoshop as part of the visual storytelling toolkit
Most of the work I show publicly centers on illustration, creative direction and animated visual communication, but photographic image treatment has long been part of the same production toolkit.
For a project like this, retouching is not simply corrective. It becomes part of the concept: changing appearance, character and visual context in service of the story and, in this case, the joke.
