User:ZehnKatzen/Sandbox

You Suck At Photoshop
Image:YSAP Sandy.jpg Donnie Hoyle works on the photo of Sandy in YSAP Episode 7
Also known as	YSAP
Genre	comedy, tutorial
Created by	Matt Bledsoe and Troy Hitch
Starring	Troy Hitch
Voices of	Troy Hitch as Donnie Hoyle Matt Bledsoe as Sn4tchbuckl3r
Country of origin	United States
Original language	English
Production
Running time	usually 5-8 minutes per epidsode
Original release
Release	21 December 2007 (2007-12-21) – Currently in production
Related
Sn4tchbuckl3r's Second Chance

You Suck At Photoshop is an comedy/tutorial series with adult-themed humor designed by Matt Bledsoe and Troy Hitch of the Big Fat Institute for Advanced Interactive Design and hosted at My Damn Channel. The show is is a notable Internet sensation, starting as essentially a one-off parody of instructional videos and becoming wildly popular almost overnight; since its debut in December 2007, the first episode alone has logged over 1.5 million YouTube views and over 600,000 on its My Damn Channel channel.

Show Format and Subject Matter

Each episode stars a Photoshop user, identified as Donnie Hoyle, demonstrating tools and techniques in Photoshop CS3, usually on a Macintosh computer. Donnie is a person with severe and chronic personal problems relating to his job, his relationships and disiniegrating marriage, various legal problems, career and emotional problems, which tend to weave themselves into the narrative to dark comedic effect. Each episode's title card is further distinguished by a different misspelling which can be interpreted as part of the joke of each episode or is spelled so as to suggest an off-color reference. Further clues to Donnie's state of mind can probably be inferred from the ever-changing desktop wallpaper seen during the demonstration.

Despite Donnie's rather intractable life problems, he does manage to effectively demonstrate Photoshop CS3 tools and techniques, such as selecting via Color Range, Curves, Vanishing Point, and other essential tools.

Originally intended as a one-off series, YSAP went into a second series due to overwhelming fan demand and support.

The series is into its second season on My Damn Channel; the first season is complete at 10 episodes. It has one spinoff, a four-episode My Damn Channel series known as Sn4tchbuckler's Second Chance.

Awards

The series made such a splash that it was awarded not one but two Webby awards; one for Best How-To and Best Comedy Series – People's Voice.

Characters

• Donnie Hoyle (voiced by Troy Hitch) is the series' main character, tutor, and victim. Starting the series as an unhappily-married (and apparently henpecked) man, desperately unhappy in his job as dumping manager of a waste-management company called Phebco, he relieves stress by making video tutorials of an application he is a master of – Adobe Photoshop CS3. He is so angry, though, that he cannot help but let his discontent over his strife-laden marriage, lack of accomplishment and contempt toward other people who don't know Photoshop as well show through (as witness the very title of the series). He's fighting a losing battle against his lifestyle and typically takes it out on the viewer through scornful comments and sarcasm. The creators of the character have this to day about him, from their TIME magazine profile:

Hitch and Bledsoe had long nurtured an idea for a character they thought of as the Angry Photoshop Guy. Explains Bledsoe: "We had both been in the agency business so long that after a while we'd seen every kind of person in the advertising world." One of those stereotypes, he says, was the "insane designer, basically. He has horrible social skills and horrible things going on in his life, and the only thing he has going for him is he can out-Photoshop the guy in the cube next to him."

• 'Sn4chbuckl3r' (voiced by Matt Bledsoe) is the series' only other continuing supporting character, and appears to be Donnie's closest friend as well as a regular co-player of World of Warcraft. He speaks with what appears to be a Hispanic accent, and both taunts him and seems to also function as Donnie's only friendly contact with the world at large. His speech is characterized by what would otherwise be expletives that are cleverly replaced by similarly-sounding words (e.g. What the Schmidt!)
• Different uncredited characters include Donnie's wife (usually heard hectoring him in the early episodes) and Donnie's co-workers at Phebco (heard when he had to do a couple of tutorials from his workplace after legal trouble during his divorce caused him to be locked out of his house).

Episode Guide: Season One

Season One of YSAP was presented on My Damn Channel every other week from 21 Dec 2007 through 4 Apr 2008. It comprises 10 regular episodes and one season-ending tribute episode.

• Episode One – You Sucjk at Photoshop: Distort, Warp and Layer Effects: Donnie uses distort and warp to paste a copy of his marriage license over the driver's side of the van in which his wife was conducting a certain infidelity. Layer effects are used to blend the license graphic so that it looks pasted on. Released 21 Dec 2008.
• Episode Two - You Suck at Photoshop: Covering Your Mistakes: Donnie demonstrates how to cover areas with cutting, pasting, and overlaying color, then making it look realistic with the eraser tool, demonstrating on a picture of a cat his wife rescued and now insists he care for over the weekend while she's on a business trip. Sn4chbuckl3r appears to taunt him. Released 9 Jan 2008.
• Episode Three: You Suck at Photardshop: Clone Stamp and Manual Cloning: Donnie demonstrates two ways to cover up the ring on his wife's finger, Clone Stamp and manual cloning – a technique where similar nearby areas are cut and pasted and then blended in. Released 18 Jan 2008.
• Episode Four - You Suck it Photoshop: Paths and Masks: Donnie demonstrates how to use paths to create clipping masks to simplify putting an imported graphic on a background. Released 25 Jan 2008.
• Episode Five - You Suck at Photoshops: Select Color Range: Donnie is looking forward to a vacation after "accidentally Pricelining a three-connection flight to a discount Mexican beach", and uses Select > Color Range to lift a complex object – a hammock – out of a background so that he can place it on a tropical beach graphic. His plans go for naught, however, when his supervisor informs him that he'll have to cancel his "little-man discovery trip" to go on a business trip. Misery ensues. This episode is recorded at Donnie's workplace because of apparent legal troubles over his house. Released 1 Feb 2008.
• Episode Six - You Sick at Photoshop - Filter-Liquefy: Returning from his business trip, Donnie is trapped at the airport for a 96-hour layover because his boss misbooked the return. Sadly for Donnie, he is shy of public restrooms, though toward the end of the episode, Sn4chbuckler can be heard Skyping in to encourage him to "see what Brown can do" for him. The liquefy tool is demonstrated, showing how one might gradually distort an object to enlarge it. Not for the squeamish. Released 15 Feb 2008.
• Episode Seven - Yo Suck At Photoshop: Patch Tool and Levels: A Donnie fan, only known as Sandy, sends Donnie her Facebook picture to "hot up", as she too has been in a divorce and needs to be "hip deep in College-boy beef loaf ASAP". Donnie demonstrates how one might use the Patch tool to fix areas and attempts to use the Levels tool to obscure Sandy's obvious flaws. Released 22 Feb 2008.
• Episode Eight - You Such a Photoshop: 3D Layers: Donnie tries to take his budding relationship with Sandy to the next level by showing her what he's willing to do to his house to welcome her and her "littlekin" sons (who are aspiring mini-car racers) to accommodate them. With 3D Layers, he's able to import a 3D model file and treat it as a maskable object in Photoshop. Released 7 March 2008.
• Episode Nine – You Suck a Photosack: Curves: Donnie gets denied by Sandy, and uses tomatoes as a surrogate for his desires. Curves allows him to use two differently-lighted images and make them look as though they belong in the same photos. Also, Sn4tchbuckl3r breaks the news to Donnie that he's out of the Horde ... he's just too surly. Released 21 March 2008
• Episode Ten - You Suck At Photoshop: Vanishing Point: At the end of his rope, a placid Donnie promises "something wonderful is going to happen to you", and, in his best Dave Bowmanesque voice, shows the viewer how to use Vanishing Point to create a train big enough to take all his friends to a special place ... and then goes there on his own, somehow escaping the SWAT team who have come to evict him from his house. Released 4 April 2008.
• Season-ending Tribute Episode - A Donnie Hoyle Tribute by Sn4chbuckl3r: Sn4chbuckler conference-calls with his Horde colleagues jeffb0yardee and pwnsurm0m (represented, respectively, by avatars depicting Mr. T and Ron Jeremy and exhorts them to use Photoshop (or, maybe, the GIMP) to produce a suitable tribute to Donnie ... then dissolves the Horde. At the end of the episode we see Sn4chbuckl3r logging into a new site: Peopleburg. This episode referred to a sidebar on the My Damn Channel site which he ostensibly "hacked" to allow download of the train track landscape seen in Episode 10 as well as a way to upload graphics as part of a Donnie tribute.