What if women ruled the world? Would Oprah Winfrey's face be on banknotes? Would Sex and The City's Carrie Bradshaw run the Pentagon? Would racing cars be pink? Would the electric chair have cushions? You can imagine the possibilities, or you can go to the Worth 1000 site and see them in glorious colour, thanks to the modern phenomenon known as Photoshopping. With Adobe's digital manipulation program, or something similar, people can make realistic images of almost anything.
Worth 1000 - named because a picture is worth a thousand words - holds a continuous stream of Photoshopping competitions. It sets themes and members do their creative best. Visitors comment and vote so the best rise to the top and the worst are culled. The result is usually a gallery of one or two dozen images that are well worth seeing. The site has been public since January 1, 2002, so there are now hundreds of thousands of them.
"If Women Ruled" is a typical theme, and Worth 1000 has five galleries based on that idea. Of course, "if X ruled" allows for endless variations. What if dogs ruled? We've also enjoyed the rule of babies, Canadians, cowboys, geniuses, goths, hackers, hippies, little girls, mime artists, pimps, pirates, rednecks, the Amish, the dead, and even Trekkies.
Celebrities are another great source of material, and galleries of what celebrities would look like if they had a sex change or went bald have been republished in newspapers. Advertisements, classic paintings (or "Ren") and popular movies are also grist to the mill. Worth 1000 is where you can see Ron ("Is your wand not working like it should?") in an advert for Wizagra, while Hermione features on the Official Harry Potter Home Pregnancy Test kit ("Works like magic"). Click on Galleries and look for Harry Potter Everything in the index under H.
Lots of entries are based on familiar paintings such as American Gothic, the Mona Lisa, Edvard Munch's The Scream, and Van Gogh's room in Arles. Just add an iPod, a TV set, or a copy of Playboy. Although Photoshopping is the core of Worth 1000, the site also runs competitions for photography, multimedia and text. There are tutorials and competitions for beginners, and "head to heads". There's the option to pay (in site credits) to enter some contests for the chance to win a jackpot. Companies can also offer cash prizes if they want a new logo design, for example.
You have to register to get the best out of Worth 1000, otherwise you can't see the images full size. Also, registering lets you add pictures to a favourites list, so you can find them again. Even better, you can see who else favourited the same pictures, and then look at thumbnails of all their favourites. This can be a quick way to find the sort of images you like.
Of course, while you can spend a lot of time looking at images on Worth 1000, it can take even longer to produce them. But everyone is welcome to have a go.
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