Hey Pandas, Show Us Some Of The Examples Of Terrible Photoshop That You Have Encountered (Closed)

The internet has given us many beautiful things: cat videos, niche memes, and the ability to order a burrito without talking to another human.
But it has also gifted us something even more powerful – a never-ending stream of truly terrible Photoshop.
From missing legs to extra hands and shadows that belong in another dimension, bad photo editing is its own chaotic art form.

This article is inspired by classic Bored Panda-style community threads where people shared the worst Photoshop fails they’ve ever seen –
the kind that make you laugh, cringe, and question how that image ever left someone’s hard drive.
We’ll walk through common types of disasters, how to spot them, why they matter, and yes, why we secretly love them anyway.

What Counts As “Terrible Photoshop,” Anyway?

Not every edited photo is a disaster. Professional retouching can subtly fix lighting, clean up blemishes, and enhance colors without screaming,
“I was edited by a raccoon at 3 a.m.” The problem starts when edits ignore basic anatomy, perspective, or physics.

Galleries of Photoshop fails from humor sites, photography blogs, and design roundups are full of recurring themes: warped backgrounds, missing body parts,
cloned limbs, and bodies stretched like taffy. These aren’t small tweaks; they’re edits so extreme that even a casual viewer can tell something is deeply wrong.

In other words, “terrible Photoshop” is any edit that:

• Immediately looks off, uncanny, or physically impossible.
• Tries to sell a fantasy as reality (like impossible body proportions or product images) and fails badly.
• Breaks basic rules of light, shadow, perspective, or anatomy.

Classic Categories Of Photoshop Disasters

1. Warped Bodies And Missing Anatomy

If you’ve ever stared at an ad and thought, “Where is her other leg?” – congratulations, you’ve encountered a classic Photoshop fail.
Many famous examples feature impossibly tiny waists, extra fingers, or limbs that seem to bend at angles only a video game character could pull off.
Compilations of magazine and social media fails show celebrities and influencers with missing knees, elongated arms, and torsos that look like they were made of rubber.

Often, these happen when editors overuse liquify tools to slim bodies or exaggerate curves. The background gives it away: curved door frames, bent tiles, or railings
that suddenly wobble around a hip or shoulder. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

2. Shadows And Lighting From Another Universe

Another giveaway is inconsistent light. Professional photographers and retouchers point out that shadows, highlights, and color temperature should match across the image.
In a lot of bad edits, they don’t. The subject might be lit from the left while the background is clearly lit from the right, or the person glows with warm studio light
while standing in a cool, overcast street.

Over-edited photos also often have flattened contrast and strange highlight–shadow balance, where everything looks oddly “HDR-ish” or plastic.
Some editing guides warn that when objects in direct light and objects in shadow are nearly the same brightness, the image starts to feel fake and over-processed.

3. Floating Objects And Glitchy Backgrounds

Then there are floating limbs, cutout products, and props that cast no shadow and have no connection to the scene.
Think of a model “holding” a product that clearly isn’t aligned with their hand, or a person standing on a floor where their feet don’t quite touch the ground.

Background issues are also a huge tell. When editors clone or patch backgrounds badly, you’ll see repeating patterns: the exact same tree, brick, or cloud copied and pasted
like a visual glitch. In some infamous ad and catalog fails, stair rails bend for no reason or city skylines repeat like wallpaper.

4. Plastic Skin And Over-Smoothing

One of the most common modern fails is “plastic” skin – overly smoothed faces with erased pores, blurred noses, and eyes sharpened to scary intensity.
Celebrity Photoshop fails highlighted in media roundups often show faces that look more like video game characters than real people.

While light retouching to reduce blemishes is fairly standard, many editors and photographers warn that removing all texture crosses a line.
People start to look waxy, ageless, and vaguely robotic. The moment skin looks more like polished marble than living tissue, the edit becomes distracting.

5. Over-The-Top Filters And Color Carnage

Oversaturated skies, neon-green grass, glowing teeth, and eyes that look like LED lights – if a scene looks too vivid to exist in real life,
there’s probably been some heavy editing. Photography and editing blogs call these “post-processing sins,” where the editor falls in love with sliders
instead of the actual photo.

Overuse of filters and color grading can make an image feel more like a mobile game ad than a real moment. The most viral examples combine warped bodies
with nuclear-level saturation – a two-for-one fail special.

Why Terrible Photoshop Fails Go Viral

So why do we love these disasters so much? Part of it is pure comedy. There’s something hilarious about an ultra-serious luxury ad where the model secretly has three hands.
Humor sites and social media communities constantly share “worst Photoshop fails” compilations because the internet loves pointing out the obvious mistakes everyone somehow missed.

There’s also a bit of satisfaction in seeing overly polished images slip up. When brands and influencers push unrealistic beauty standards,
catching a bendy wall or missing thigh feels like a tiny victory for reality. It reminds us that the “perfect” bodies we see online often owe more to pixels than genetics.

How To Spot A Photoshop Fail In The Wild

You don’t need to be a forensic analyst to catch most terrible edits. You just need to slow down and look for a few key clues:

• Check the background. Are lines (door frames, tiles, railings, bricks) warped near someone’s waist, arms, or legs?
• Follow the light. Do shadows fall in the same direction? Does the subject’s lighting match the environment?
• Look at anatomy. Count fingers. Check where joints bend. Ask yourself: “Could a human body actually do that?”
• Scan for repeating patterns. Are trees, clouds, or people duplicated exactly? That often means heavy cloning.
• Zoom in on edges. Sloppy cutouts often have halos, jagged lines, or mismatched color around hair, hands, and clothing.
• Watch for plastic skin. If someone has no pores but razor-sharp eyelashes and hyper-bright eyes, the retouching probably went overboard.

More advanced forensic tools can analyze image metadata, compression patterns, and lighting consistency, but for everyday scrolling,
your best tools are curiosity and a healthy dose of “Does this make sense?”

When Bad Photoshop Stops Being Funny

While a lot of terrible Photoshop is harmless entertainment, not all of it is just for laughs. There are a few areas where bad editing crosses into uncomfortable territory:

• Body image and self-esteem. Unrealistic body edits, even when poorly done, still reinforce impossible standards, especially for younger viewers.
• Misinformation. Composite images or manipulated “evidence” can be used to support conspiracy theories, fake news, or harmful rumors.
• Deceptive advertising. Over-edited product photos can mislead customers about size, color, or results (think miracle creams or fitness before-and-afters).

Experts in digital media and visual literacy point out that the line between “funny fail” and “damaging manipulation” can be thin.
A goofy extra arm in a fashion ad might be harmless, but a doctored image used to fabricate an event or smear someone’s reputation isn’t.

How Not To Become A Photoshop Meme Yourself

If you edit your own photos, you probably don’t want to end up in a “Top 50 Photoshop Fails” list. Good news: avoiding disaster is mostly about restraint and paying attention.

• Start with a decent photo. Editing can polish a good shot, but it can’t rescue a fundamentally bad one.
• Use small adjustments. Nudge sliders instead of slamming them. Tiny changes stack up quickly.
• Zoom in and out. Check details up close, then zoom out to see if the whole image still looks natural.
• Respect anatomy. If you’re reshaping a body, follow real proportions. If it wouldn’t work in real life, it won’t work on-screen either.
• Walk away and come back. A short break will help you see weird color casts, crooked lines, or overdone smoothing.
• Get a second opinion. Ask a friend, “Does this look off to you?” Fresh eyes catch a lot of mistakes.

Think of good editing like good makeup: it enhances what’s there without shouting about itself. The best Photoshop is often the kind no one notices.

Extra: Storytime From The Closed Panda Thread

Since the original “Hey Pandas, show us terrible Photoshop” thread is closed to new submissions, consider this a bonus round of shared experiences –
a mash-up of the kinds of things people confessed seeing, posting, or even accidentally creating.

One person described a school newsletter photo where the principal wanted to “look more engaged.”
Someone hastily Photoshopped his head so he’d be turned toward the students.
Unfortunately, they rotated only the head – not the neck, not the shoulders, just the head.
The result looked like something from a horror movie: suit facing forward, head twisted at an impossible angle, smiling proudly.
Parents didn’t know whether to donate to the school or call an exorcist.

Another common story: group photos where the editor tries to combine the “best” faces from multiple shots.
A family might send in three different images and ask, “Can you make everyone look good?” The outcome?
A Frankenstein family where one sibling’s head is slightly too big, grandma’s face is oddly sharp compared to everyone else,
and one cousin’s hand belongs to a completely different frame.
At first glance it looks fine; the longer you stare, the weirder it gets.

Retail catalogs also showed up in people’s tales.
One commenter remembered flipping through a furniture catalog and spotting a woman “sitting” on the edge of a couch.
Except she wasn’t really sitting; she was floating a few inches above the cushion, and her shadow didn’t match the sofa at all.
Someone had clearly cut her out from another photo and dropped her into the scene, but they forgot to adjust the angle or add a realistic shadow.
The couch looked comfy; the physics did not.

Social media, of course, is a gold mine.
People shared stories of acquaintances with impossibly smooth faces, razor-thin waists, and drifting background tiles.
In one case, a friend posted a beach selfie with an ocean horizon that dipped dramatically downward near her waist –
the sure sign of a liquify tool used a little too enthusiastically.
The comments stayed polite (“You look amazing!”), but everyone in the group chat quietly sent each other screenshots of the curved horizon.

Then there are well-meaning DIY disasters:
a pet owner who tried to add angel wings to their dog’s memorial photo and accidentally layered them in front of the dog’s head;
a hobbyist photographer who brightened a sunset so much that the sky turned radioactive orange;
or someone who tried to “fix” a group photo by cloning grass over a stranger in the background, only to leave a ghostly half-leg behind.

What all these stories have in common is that no one set out to make a terrible edit.
Most of the time, people just wanted a slightly nicer picture – a little more light, a little less clutter, a touch of smoothing.
Somewhere between good intentions and the final export, they took one slider too far, hit save, and unleashed a masterpiece of accidental comedy.

And that’s the strange charm of terrible Photoshop.
It reminds us that behind every “perfect” image is a person clicking, dragging, guessing, and sometimes messing up spectacularly.
We can still talk seriously about media literacy, body image, and misinformation – but we can also admit that a badly edited extra leg in a fashion ad
will always make the internet collectively lose its mind.

Wrapping It Up (Before Someone Adds An Extra Arm)

Terrible Photoshop is the wild intersection of technology, ego, and human error.
We get to laugh at obviously fake edits, question claims that rely on manipulated images, and learn to be better, more skeptical viewers in the process.
Whether it’s a celebrity with a vanishing waist, a catalog model floating above a couch, or your own over-smoothed selfie from years ago,
these fails tell the story of how powerful – and how risky – digital editing can be.

The original “Hey Pandas” thread may be closed, but the spirit of it lives on every time someone spots a bent doorframe,
a plastic face, or a shadow that refuses to obey physics.
As long as people keep chasing “perfect” images with imperfect skills, the world will never run out of terrible Photoshop –
and honestly, that might be one of the internet’s greatest ongoing gifts.