A floor is a ceiling, a lake is made of shattered glass, carpets of grass cascade over the edge of the world and buildings sprout wheels and wander away in the fantastically surreal world of Erik Johansson. The photographer has spent much of the last decade refining his reality-bending image manipulation techniques, combining dozens of real photos to create effects that are often hyperrealistic yet physically impossible. As unlikely as it may seem, Johansson uses no CGI, stock photos or digital illustrations in his work – each image is a complex collage of his own photographs, captured on his Hasselblad HD5-40 camera.

On his YouTube channel, the artist offers behind-the-scenes videos for many of his works so we can see just how each one is assembled. For his newest piece, ‘Impact,’ Johansson carefully cut four massive mirrors into fragments, arranged them in a field and photographed his model standing among them in a kayak. Photos from this shoot are ultimately blended with images of a lake and additional studio photos of cracked mirror shards.

Depicting just about every step the artist takes during the process, the videos are just as impressive as the final images and make it clear that the arduous process requires many hours of retouching. Johansson even leaves in the parts where he experiments with various effects and ideas that don’t make it to the final version.

As he explains on his website, Johansson is interested in capturing ideas rather than moments, but with the goal of making each one look as realistic as possible, saying “The only thing that limits us is our imagination.”

Skiers land jumps on ice cream cones, construction equipment struggles to transport oversized hot dogs and jet-powered seagulls zoom through the sky in a series of surreal photographic collages by Stephen McMennamy. Creative director of the advertising agency BBDO, McMennamy takes original photos of everything from meatballs to hand grenades and puts them together in unexpected ways, calling the results ‘combophotos.’

Inspired by the plethora of talent and creativity that can be found on Instagram, the photographer set out to pair things you’d never imagine together. Rather than seamlessly blending the photos in Photoshop so they appear to be a single composition, McMennamy simply matches up the contours of each subject, leaving behind the demarcation lines.

This technique results in images that tell an entirely different story than each of the originals, turning what would be highly ordinary, stock-photo-type images into something else altogether. McMennamy’s curiosity was initially piqued by photo apps that let you layer photos into collage compositions, and then he tried connecting images for a more fluid effect.

“The whole thing is one big scavenger hunt,” says the artist. “Sometimes it’s as simple as playing with scale and other times there’s a more meaningful message being told, like the cigarettes and French fries image but for the most part it’s just visual fun, like a truck with skateboard wheels.”

In another case of Photoshop invading the real world in three dimensions, giant erasers are appearing all over urban surfaces in London. Murals, street signs, billboards and trash bins are among the objects getting the Photoshop treatment with ‘Street Eraser,’ a joint project by artists Guus Ter Beek and Tayfun Sarier.

The installation consists of a series of handmade stickers plastered all over the city, featuring the gray and white checkered pattern that appears when you erase something in Adobe Photoshop.

A similar project used cardboard props to recreate the look of a photoshopped image in progress, with the photographer using the eraser tool on himself. Another photographer takes Photoshop tools literally with humorous interpretations of commands like ‘convert to smart object’, ‘smudge’ and ‘puppet warp.’

At first, you’re not sure what you’re looking at. Are these strange portraits, their subjects seeming to disassemble before your very eyes, wire sculptures? They are incredibly three-dimensional, bursting with vitality and movement. But they’re actually digital creations, the result of a collaboration between graphic designer and illustrator Ayaka Ito and programmer Randy Church.

The Scribbled Line People project was inspired by the wire sculptures of Rachel Drucker as well as the Flash paintings of designer Erik Natzke, and it seems as if you could reach out and touch them.

Ito and Church took snapshots of people and used software like Flash and Photoshop to deconstruct them into series of flowing lines that retain a high level of realism while also suspending reality.

In effect, these human forms seem to be broken down into pure energy, revealing the kinetic forces that flow within them as well as their innate fragility.

Massive concrete blocks float in the sky, high above the Empire State building, each inhabited by a single seemingly bewildered person. Gravity no longer applies, and residents walk around in a daze. Welcome to the dreamlike fictional urban landscapes of Russian artist Eugene Soloviev.

Soloviev’s digital art has an ominous tone to it, often featuring solitary figures in seeming contemplation of the chaos and strangeness of their environments. Muted tones, dark clouds and fog enhance a sense of disquiet. The images call to mind concept art for films, hinting at a meaning behind the confusion.

Within Soloviev’s images seems to be a wordless story, an explanation as to why a seemingly ordinary city is suddenly no longer subject to laws of physics, or for the alien-looking architecture that has sprouted up among skyscrapers. But that silence is entangled within the beauty of visual art – it forces our own creativity into action, coercing a fictional narrative from our minds.

Entirely self-taught, the 21-year-old artist started out with simple photo manipulation in programs like Photoshop and Corel, and says that “for a joke” he cut out objects and placed them in non-standard landscapes. Ultimately, Soloviev refined both his skills and his particular brand of surreal atmosphere to produce a cohesive, thought-provoking body of work.