50 Examples of the Droste EffectA while back I was at work with nothing to do, during down time or something, and I wanted to make some kind of graphic or something in Photoshop, but I couldn’t think of anything to make. So I thought why not make the thing I was looking at, my computer screen! I didn’t really expect much from the end result since I was just doing it to kill some time, so I just started to create it just for the hell of doing something.

When I was just about finished I felt like something was missing from it, since at that point the screen of the monitor was just a blank gray square. I figured since I was making the thing I was looking at, my computer monitor, it should show what was on the screen which was the image I just made in Photoshop, in Photoshop…

Now stay with me here.
Once I put a screen shot of my screen, on the screen I just created, it needed to continue into itself over and over. Otherwise there would be a blank gray screen that wouldn’t fit because it wasn’t what I was looking at, and it turned out to look better when making it continue further into the image. As I did this I realized that it was making it look like several pictures I have seen before and have always liked the illusion of such images. In the end what I created is far more impressive than what I expected, when I started to make something I was only doing to ease my boredom.

Here is the image I created, entirely in Photoshop:

my-droste-effect

Now I made this last year and I just now found out that this kind of recursive picture is called The Droste Effect. I have Paulo Canabarro to thank for posting a list of 50 examples of the Droste Effect on Webdesigner Depot. I never knew how to describe this type of image, or that it had a particular name for which to call it even. His examples are really amazing, as well as the videos, and they can be overwhelming after looking at a few of them. It’s hard to get past the illusion to understand how some of them were created, but once you do, you see that it isn’t really that difficult to produce this effect.

Have you ever created an image that used the Droste Effect?
If yes, please share :)

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