#frogshop

I tried to find more information about Albert here. There is an article in The Mirror, but some of the reporting seems dubious. Which I believe is standard operating procedure for that particular news outlet.

But according to the article, "Fat Albert" lives in the very specific area of "Alaska, USA" and is believed to be the fattest polar bear in the world. And they claim he got fat because the townspeople of "Alaska, USA" are following an ancient tradition that dates back "thousands of years."

"The locals throw out large amounts of whale blubber to the bears as a sign of 'respect'. They would cut a large portion of the whale and blubber, and drag it four miles out of town for the bears to find. This stops the bears from travelling into town to harvest and disrupting the process. In other words, it's a way to stop a group of hungry bears coming towards you in a hurry."

From supplemental research there is precedent for folks in Russia and Alaska to leave whale carcasses for polar bears, but I could not find any corroborating evidence about Albert specifically.

So, I rate this myth...

In any case, when I saw this picture of Albert, it seemed like a good opportunity to practice my Photoshop skills. He has clearly been rolling around in some mud and his beautiful white coat has been obscured.

It is very easy to change the color of something to red, blue, or green and every color in between. Just hit that hue/saturation and check colorize and you've got Pride Albert in a jiffy.

However, it is much more challenging to change things to white or black. This is the bane of graphic designers who have to take the same picture of a t-shirt and digitally alter it to be every available color including black and white.

So I challenged myself to give Fat Albert a bath.

And then I challenged myself again to make him a distant relative.

I wish I could tell you the exact process for how to do this, but this is one of those things you have to trial and error your way through and I honestly don't remember everything I did.

One thing I can tell you is that I definitely, absolutely, positively named all my layers properly—as that is best practice and I am a good Photoshop boy.