What are you talking about; this image is legitimately quite a good effect for early-days photoshopping. It's not perfect, but it's perfectly fine for a student project with an enjoyable result.
The pure audacity of the "g", which in honesty couldn't have had anything else done with it without becoming even more jarring and interfering with the readability, only adds to the impact. 10/10
Depending on when this was, that could have been pretty sophisticated. We wouldn’t think much of it now, but there was a time where I purchased expensive books on step by step instructions for wild text effects. We’d laugh at them now, but they were cutting edge in the 90s.
Removing backgrounds used to be a highly specialized skill that took hours, or plugins that cost hundreds of dollars. Same with eye and teeth touch-up. It's crazy how automated Photoshop stuff is these days.
I just cut the background out using a free website two days ago! All I had to do was upload it, and some AI system recognized the people and knew how to cut them out. Oh, and it's built right into the Apple photo app now. They can just drag the people and they pop right off the background. It's amazing! I used to have to use the extraction tool, the pen tool, and hours worth of time to get hair cropped out looking realistic. We're living in the fuuuutuurre!
I like that the reflections largely indicate that the text is sitting right on top of the water surface. And then you have this weird, non-euclidean, lowercase 'g' that completely demolishes the perspective.
The lower half of the g is actually folded in a 90 degree angle and lying flat on the surface of the water, which also explains why it has no reflection. Truly a photo manipulation worthy of a first place.
Dude, the post itself is making funny of how bad their own photoshop was. How is it not ok for anyone else? It's not like the person who tweeted this will ever see this thread anyway.
