The millions of people worldwide who will likely open the latest version of Adobe Photoshop, the leading image-editing computer program, will be greeted by a splash screen depicting an image from “Falling … (Round Things),” by Egyptian digital artist Amr Elshamy. Against all odds, Elshamy, also an aspiring filmmaker, has become the first Egyptian and first Arab artist to have artwork featured on a Photoshop splash screen. The happy-go-lucky Elshamy never imagined that “Falling” would produce a reaction contrary, so to speak, to its title — i.e., rising to the top of the digital art world.
“Falling” consists of three panels that depict, respectively, a girl appearing to fall from the sky toward a circle of trees, a boy standing amid circular mountains, and the two preceding images combined. Adobe selected the image of the boy alone for the splash screen of Photoshop CC 2017.