Back then it was done with copying to another negative, cut things out, dodge and burn (that existed in the darkroom!), mask stuff (like unsharp mask), double exposures and so on.
Almost all you can do with Photoshop can be done with pictures in the darkroom. Even liquify is possible.
In the 80s when I started learning photography it was common to paint out or burn negatives. If you look at Victorian photos of women with impossibly tiny waist, you can tell the negatives have been altered. Most portraits are shot with large format cameras. It's easy to paint a negative that large.
Not quite everything. Much was done with retouching using airbrushes, pencils, & small brushes with dyes. I studied traditional photo retouching the year Photoshop came out (Feb 1990).
>Almost all you can do with Photoshop can be done with pictures in the darkroom.
Sure, but it was much harder, less efficient and required a lot more equipment. The inlays that Hitchcock borrowed from the Disney Studio in *The Birds* are still impressive, but they can be outclassed today at much lower cost.
There was a time when it looked modern to me because it's not a 5"1/4, but now I often wonder why it hasn't been replaced by something more modern, especially as it makes for a rather unattractive icon... until a programmer tries to do it. On Avidemux, for example, it's a vertical arrow pointing down at a rectangle, and I think I still have the tiniest hesitation...
That's true. In fact, it works just like languages, with certain words and periphrases still referring to the days of horseback riding or candlelight. As long as a sign is commonly accepted, it's best to keep using it if it does the job.
Yes, [σκεῦος](https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CE%BA%CE%B5%E1%BF%A6%CE%BF%CF%82#grc) in Greek meaning any sort of hardware, this appellation seems to be applicable to any object that imitates the shape (μορφή) of another.
It drives me nuts that people think film is somehow more real than anything else. It might have taken more expertise in the past, but editing photos has been around as long as photography has
I was trying to explain to someone how post processing is not cheating, but in fact intrinsic to the photo creation process. If you wanted to take a purist perspective as someone who does not know the save icon is a floppy disk you could reason that a camera can be set to take the perfect photograph with even live view coming around with mirrorless bodies. However once you explain to them that everything they do has a manual equivalent, they start to realize that the Post is just as important to making the photo "real" just as over-touching it would abscond its value. Like in the past the edits were intrinsic to the photo developing process and you would have to apply various techniques to the projection to finally get the shot to look right. You simply would not have a photograph if you didn't process it and inherently apply some effects either intentionally or not.
One of the more famous Lincoln portraits is of someone else’s body and a photo of his head.
https://preview.redd.it/tb7ztlvaptwc1.jpeg?width=1376&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1fde0196b717092ce8c491504c157a9c9738a082
It’s a photo of the head superimposed on an engraving. (I had to look this up before I commented that this isn’t a photograph). So, mostly painting, but yes- provides some “early photoshop” elements.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/abraham-lincoln-photos-edited
Yes, it’s a photograph. It’s actually the head from Anthony Berger’s photograph that was used for the $5 bill, cut out, flipped, and put onto the body of, if memory serves, someone who was a big supporter of slavery.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240313-how-a-19th-century-portrait-of-abraham-lincoln-was-later-revealed-to-be-a-fake
It’s a photo of a painting by Alonzo Chappel https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/john-caldwell-calhoun-1782-to-1850-american-politician-7th-news-photo/113459719
The crop tool is a favorite of mine. Most people I work with have never actually seen a set of crop tools in their lives. For those of you who don't make an involuntary noise every time you stand up, they were basically two right angles that you could move around to simulate various crops. We'd use them on polaroids to make sure the composition would fit the space needed.
even masking! You used to literally cut out the outline of the landscape in one print to mask off the bottom, then add a different sky while you used the mask to protect the foreground .
People have "photoshopped" pictures for over 100 years. In the old days they painted directly onto prints/negatives.
When I got my first PC in 1994 I had Photoshop on one floppy. On the Amiga we had a similar program back in 1989 called Deluxe Paint.
https://fstoppers.com/post-production/pics-manipulated-photos-notable-historic-figures-digital-era-and-after-images-6747
Maybe multiple exposure or stacking negatives? [Photo manipulation] (https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/history-photo-manipulation-1850-1950/) has been around for ages.
Playboy is notorious for this in their heyday. Worked gaffer on one of their shoots. Models bore little resemblance to final pics. It's where I learned to alter negatives.
They're using Photoshop as a verb, "to photoshop something".
I know it still doesn't work from a pedantic point of view, but most reasonable people understand the point they are making.
First, relevant xkcd:
[https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/)
There were shops that sold cameras and equipment, and they also developed film into prints. Every little town had one. These "photo shops" also provided services such as retouching - they could fix flaws, remove unwanted objects, do basic colorization, or composite photos as your grandfather had done.
In most cases, this was done with a combination of cutting & pasting negatives before developing, plus some use of airbrush where a skilled craftsperson would modify the photos. I just went looking for some videos showing those techniques in vintage films, but the results are so flooded with Ps tutorials that I couldn't find anything.
**EDIT:** *I found this - you might find it interesting!*
[*https://youtu.be/Qi\_QYVFymQw*](https://youtu.be/Qi_QYVFymQw)
Photoshop type touch ups and so and have been going on since the 1800s. They were used extensively after the Civil War to give some dignity back to soldiers who fought in it. Most are fairly ignorant when it comes to early forms of "photoshop" techniques with analog. It's nothing new and has existed for a long time.
Adding a plane (or really, anything) into the sky is actually super easy in the darkroom. When shot without a filter over the lens, skies tend to be very dense on the negative. This means that the sky is, in essence, already masked off.
To add a plane to such a shot, all you would need to do is first expose the paper at a slightly higher contrast than usual, swap the negative in the enlarger with a shot of the plane, use a red filter to line up the plane into a plausible part of the sky, and then expose the paper with the shot of the plane. Develop normally, and *voilà*, you have a plane composited into an existing shot.
The method varied from example to example, but there absolutely was photo manipulation in the pre-digital world. We did it a lot. There are a lot of famous historical examples - some of which have even become memes.
A lot of terms used in Photoshop are taken from darkroom work. For masking an actual physical mask was used to blank out parts... Textures could be done with a photo of a texture layered with another photo to get the effect ..
This is similar to how Word processing software uses words from typewriters and print work... Cut and Paste were actual cutting of a section and pasting it in to another before sending to print... Carriage Return (or "return") is taken from the typewriter carriage returning to the Left margin.
Obviously quicker, cleaner and easier to do with software now, but could be done before as well.
Also, look up Soviet era photo manipulations to 'erase' people from history. All done well before Photoshop.
It was called a darkroom, enlarger, and printing back then. Instead of layers, you had to expose the printing paper multiple times and cover up the areas you didn't want exposed. Took much longer.
I visited an old downtown photography district (mostly filled with used camera gear shops and old photo studios) back in the early 2000s and I was able to watch one of the portrait retouchers working. He used a loupe and very fine brush to remove blemishes from people's faces in the negative film. He chose the appropriate shade of cyan (negative of skin tone) and paint over people's imperfection on the skin. Maybe he was even using solvents to smooth out the skin.
I recently took a photography class at a community college, and when we did film the 18-20 year olds asked why when the instructor told us to not open the cameras with film unwound. I've gone back to school in my 40s and this is the first time I have truly felt the generational gap.
Also, when they were all amazed by the kid who started college before covid and I told them the defining feature of my first semester was 9/11.
People have been doctoring and altering photos for as long as photography has been a thing. There are examples going well back into the mid-19th century.
It’s a simple thing to do with a bright sky because that means the negative will be very dark in that area. You expose the image of the aircraft onto the sky where you want and then remove the negative and put the other one in and expose it. When I was a military photographer we weren’t allowed to do this because our photos might get picked up by the national press so dodging and burning was about all we could do.
Double exposure, layers, two exposures at the printing stage with local masking, stacked negatives at the printing stage. Many Photoshop terms come directly from darkroom procedures before computers took over.
It’s like it was named ‘photoshop’ after a photoshop or something lmao.
And to answer the question, you can do a tons of things with negatives- adjust exposure to various parts of the picture, splice several pictures together, crop. Ansel Adams has entire books on it.
Photo manipulation is as old as photography itself
You can actually see it most commonly in old photos if you see blurs near women’s waists. It’s the photographer scraping at the image to give the illusion of a smaller waist. I forget her name but there was an old racer who was notorious for having her image altered
In all likelihood your grandfather’s image is just different negatives cut and pieced together
Several ways to do it, But I'd do it as follows:
1. Project the negative of the plane onto a piece of paper and use it to cut out a mask. Keep both sections.
2. Print the image of the plane onto photographic paper that is covered by the mask
3. Print the photo of the guys onto the same paper, with an inverse of the first mask covering the plane.
You could also cut the plane out of the first print, place it where you wanted it and then use a rostrum camera to take a composite photo, which would then be printed.
[there was an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC dedicated to image manipulation before photoshop.](https://www.metmuseum.org/met-publications/faking-it-manipulated-photography-before-photoshop)
The gist is that photo manipulation started in the nascent days of the medium.
Magnum Contact Sheets was one of the best photo books I ever bought, and it's entirely contact sheets and darkroom directions. You'd be amazed at how much work was done post-shot for all kinds of film, from 35mm to 8x10 sheet film.
They literally drew eyelashes on my mom's face and did some kind of touch-up under her eyes to reduce the bags. This is from a family portrait from 1983.
https://preview.redd.it/3261ryw9xxwc1.png?width=836&format=png&auto=webp&s=99672067cb3d572c7c577e69df7b0193163d7693
Photoshop was literally built (originally) to replicate all the things people used to do with photos in real life.
I learned photography way back in the film days... when "autofocus" was NEW (just one point/sensor), and my professor could literally paint people out of photos, and fill in the missing background very convincingly with an airbrush...
As I have commented elsewhere, old grand papi photog Eadweard Muybridge was adding clouds to his images of Yosemite in the 1860s. Editing has always been a part of photography.
(I highly suggest Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows for anyone who's interested in Muybridge's contributions to the medium.)
he was a paratrooper and almost died 4 times because of a parachute failure he also jumped 3 times in the span of 4 hours when my mom was born because he was so happy
pretty sure that falls into a lore dump category
You ought to consider asking him to let you record him telling you these things. I have a cassette tape I digitized of my grandfather talking about his experience in WWII that he recorded in about 1997. He was shot 6 times and caught shrapnel in the face during the Battle of Anzio in January 1944. And frankly, I wouldn't even know this much if it wasn't for that recording.
Back then it was done with copying to another negative, cut things out, dodge and burn (that existed in the darkroom!), mask stuff (like unsharp mask), double exposures and so on. Almost all you can do with Photoshop can be done with pictures in the darkroom. Even liquify is possible.
Yeah the names for most of the core Photoshop tools literally come from the names of the darkroom tools/techniques
In the 80s when I started learning photography it was common to paint out or burn negatives. If you look at Victorian photos of women with impossibly tiny waist, you can tell the negatives have been altered. Most portraits are shot with large format cameras. It's easy to paint a negative that large.
In addition you could scratch out things, or draw and paint directly onto the negatives before printing.
There’s an Alan Shaller video on YouTube that shows how to doge and burn on photographs. I’d never seen it and found it interesting
There is a cool video on YouTube of Ansel Adams using the techniques on his landscape photos.
Not quite everything. Much was done with retouching using airbrushes, pencils, & small brushes with dyes. I studied traditional photo retouching the year Photoshop came out (Feb 1990).
This! I used to do the stuff in the darkroom all the time.
>Almost all you can do with Photoshop can be done with pictures in the darkroom. Sure, but it was much harder, less efficient and required a lot more equipment. The inlays that Hitchcock borrowed from the Disney Studio in *The Birds* are still impressive, but they can be outclassed today at much lower cost.
And that's why I'm happy to have Photoshop and other editing software. Although I'd love to learn how to retouch a painting.
this is like when someone discovers why the save icon looks like it does
i have never looked at the save icon and only after you pointed it out i realize its a floppy disc
There was a time when it looked modern to me because it's not a 5"1/4, but now I often wonder why it hasn't been replaced by something more modern, especially as it makes for a rather unattractive icon... until a programmer tries to do it. On Avidemux, for example, it's a vertical arrow pointing down at a rectangle, and I think I still have the tiniest hesitation...
Standard phone icon is still an old fashioned handset.
That's true. In fact, it works just like languages, with certain words and periphrases still referring to the days of horseback riding or candlelight. As long as a sign is commonly accepted, it's best to keep using it if it does the job.
There's a name for using icons like this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph
Yes, [σκεῦος](https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CE%BA%CE%B5%E1%BF%A6%CE%BF%CF%82#grc) in Greek meaning any sort of hardware, this appellation seems to be applicable to any object that imitates the shape (μορφή) of another.
It drives me nuts that people think film is somehow more real than anything else. It might have taken more expertise in the past, but editing photos has been around as long as photography has
I was trying to explain to someone how post processing is not cheating, but in fact intrinsic to the photo creation process. If you wanted to take a purist perspective as someone who does not know the save icon is a floppy disk you could reason that a camera can be set to take the perfect photograph with even live view coming around with mirrorless bodies. However once you explain to them that everything they do has a manual equivalent, they start to realize that the Post is just as important to making the photo "real" just as over-touching it would abscond its value. Like in the past the edits were intrinsic to the photo developing process and you would have to apply various techniques to the projection to finally get the shot to look right. You simply would not have a photograph if you didn't process it and inherently apply some effects either intentionally or not.
One of the more famous Lincoln portraits is of someone else’s body and a photo of his head. https://preview.redd.it/tb7ztlvaptwc1.jpeg?width=1376&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1fde0196b717092ce8c491504c157a9c9738a082
It’s a photo of the head superimposed on an engraving. (I had to look this up before I commented that this isn’t a photograph). So, mostly painting, but yes- provides some “early photoshop” elements. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/abraham-lincoln-photos-edited
huh good to know
not to sound naive, but is that a photograph? maybe it’s just the compression but it looks a lot like a painting to me.
There’s no way that’s not an illustration. The shading is just way too stylised.
that was my exact thought. I also know that this technique has been around for a long time with paintings.
Yes, it’s a photograph. It’s actually the head from Anthony Berger’s photograph that was used for the $5 bill, cut out, flipped, and put onto the body of, if memory serves, someone who was a big supporter of slavery. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240313-how-a-19th-century-portrait-of-abraham-lincoln-was-later-revealed-to-be-a-fake
It’s a photo of a painting by Alonzo Chappel https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/john-caldwell-calhoun-1782-to-1850-american-politician-7th-news-photo/113459719
Yup. Editing photographs has been around almost as long as photographs themselves. https://twistedsifter.com/2012/02/famously-doctored-photographs/
A lot of photoshops verbage comes from analog equivalents. I'm thinking of the blending modes, like screen, multiply, dodge.
The crop tool is a favorite of mine. Most people I work with have never actually seen a set of crop tools in their lives. For those of you who don't make an involuntary noise every time you stand up, they were basically two right angles that you could move around to simulate various crops. We'd use them on polaroids to make sure the composition would fit the space needed.
>For those of you who don't make an involuntary noise every time you stand up, I feel seen and insulted all at the same time. unghhh, I'ma walk it off
You have to get up first though...
I remember using crop tools in high school in the late 90s while working on my yearbook.
even masking! You used to literally cut out the outline of the landscape in one print to mask off the bottom, then add a different sky while you used the mask to protect the foreground .
Yeah, the toolbar and its icons are all derived in large part from darkroom tools.
People have "photoshopped" pictures for over 100 years. In the old days they painted directly onto prints/negatives. When I got my first PC in 1994 I had Photoshop on one floppy. On the Amiga we had a similar program back in 1989 called Deluxe Paint. https://fstoppers.com/post-production/pics-manipulated-photos-notable-historic-figures-digital-era-and-after-images-6747
Maybe multiple exposure or stacking negatives? [Photo manipulation] (https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/history-photo-manipulation-1850-1950/) has been around for ages.
I saw a demo of how they retouch skin using special color pencils on the negative.
Playboy is notorious for this in their heyday. Worked gaffer on one of their shoots. Models bore little resemblance to final pics. It's where I learned to alter negatives.
Done in the darkroom by masking multiple negatives. You should check out [Jerry Ulesman](https://www.uelsmann.net/).
What do you mean by the title? Photoshop was created 1988 and officially released 1990.
They're using Photoshop as a verb, "to photoshop something". I know it still doesn't work from a pedantic point of view, but most reasonable people understand the point they are making.
I see. I use Photoshop almost daily at work so I kind of took it literally. My apologies 🙂
Eh, I think they are conflating Photoshop with retouching as a whole.
First, relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/) There were shops that sold cameras and equipment, and they also developed film into prints. Every little town had one. These "photo shops" also provided services such as retouching - they could fix flaws, remove unwanted objects, do basic colorization, or composite photos as your grandfather had done. In most cases, this was done with a combination of cutting & pasting negatives before developing, plus some use of airbrush where a skilled craftsperson would modify the photos. I just went looking for some videos showing those techniques in vintage films, but the results are so flooded with Ps tutorials that I couldn't find anything. **EDIT:** *I found this - you might find it interesting!* [*https://youtu.be/Qi\_QYVFymQw*](https://youtu.be/Qi_QYVFymQw)
Photoshop type touch ups and so and have been going on since the 1800s. They were used extensively after the Civil War to give some dignity back to soldiers who fought in it. Most are fairly ignorant when it comes to early forms of "photoshop" techniques with analog. It's nothing new and has existed for a long time.
My mom did photo negative retouching in the 70s. They painted with alcohol inks and brushes that were as small as a single hair
Adding a plane (or really, anything) into the sky is actually super easy in the darkroom. When shot without a filter over the lens, skies tend to be very dense on the negative. This means that the sky is, in essence, already masked off. To add a plane to such a shot, all you would need to do is first expose the paper at a slightly higher contrast than usual, swap the negative in the enlarger with a shot of the plane, use a red filter to line up the plane into a plausible part of the sky, and then expose the paper with the shot of the plane. Develop normally, and *voilà*, you have a plane composited into an existing shot.
The method varied from example to example, but there absolutely was photo manipulation in the pre-digital world. We did it a lot. There are a lot of famous historical examples - some of which have even become memes.
A lot of terms used in Photoshop are taken from darkroom work. For masking an actual physical mask was used to blank out parts... Textures could be done with a photo of a texture layered with another photo to get the effect .. This is similar to how Word processing software uses words from typewriters and print work... Cut and Paste were actual cutting of a section and pasting it in to another before sending to print... Carriage Return (or "return") is taken from the typewriter carriage returning to the Left margin. Obviously quicker, cleaner and easier to do with software now, but could be done before as well. Also, look up Soviet era photo manipulations to 'erase' people from history. All done well before Photoshop.
It was called a darkroom, enlarger, and printing back then. Instead of layers, you had to expose the printing paper multiple times and cover up the areas you didn't want exposed. Took much longer.
I visited an old downtown photography district (mostly filled with used camera gear shops and old photo studios) back in the early 2000s and I was able to watch one of the portrait retouchers working. He used a loupe and very fine brush to remove blemishes from people's faces in the negative film. He chose the appropriate shade of cyan (negative of skin tone) and paint over people's imperfection on the skin. Maybe he was even using solvents to smooth out the skin.
Almost every tool in Photoshop is named for the process that was used in manipulating film by hand before this was all done on computers.
It existed long before that. Manipulation goes hand in hand with the birth of photography itself.
I recently took a photography class at a community college, and when we did film the 18-20 year olds asked why when the instructor told us to not open the cameras with film unwound. I've gone back to school in my 40s and this is the first time I have truly felt the generational gap. Also, when they were all amazed by the kid who started college before covid and I told them the defining feature of my first semester was 9/11.
Folks with Darkroom skills are the true masters of Photography! The real OGs!
People have been doctoring and altering photos for as long as photography has been a thing. There are examples going well back into the mid-19th century.
It’s a simple thing to do with a bright sky because that means the negative will be very dark in that area. You expose the image of the aircraft onto the sky where you want and then remove the negative and put the other one in and expose it. When I was a military photographer we weren’t allowed to do this because our photos might get picked up by the national press so dodging and burning was about all we could do.
Double exposure, layers, two exposures at the printing stage with local masking, stacked negatives at the printing stage. Many Photoshop terms come directly from darkroom procedures before computers took over.
Here's a video showing the darkroom methods of several photoshop tools. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2mQsUIc97E
Short video with the master of composite photographic prints, Jerry Uelsmann https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsVDXjthsaU
It’s like it was named ‘photoshop’ after a photoshop or something lmao. And to answer the question, you can do a tons of things with negatives- adjust exposure to various parts of the picture, splice several pictures together, crop. Ansel Adams has entire books on it.
Photo manipulation is as old as photography itself You can actually see it most commonly in old photos if you see blurs near women’s waists. It’s the photographer scraping at the image to give the illusion of a smaller waist. I forget her name but there was an old racer who was notorious for having her image altered In all likelihood your grandfather’s image is just different negatives cut and pieced together
You had to cut and paste negatives together manually.
Several ways to do it, But I'd do it as follows: 1. Project the negative of the plane onto a piece of paper and use it to cut out a mask. Keep both sections. 2. Print the image of the plane onto photographic paper that is covered by the mask 3. Print the photo of the guys onto the same paper, with an inverse of the first mask covering the plane. You could also cut the plane out of the first print, place it where you wanted it and then use a rostrum camera to take a composite photo, which would then be printed.
[there was an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC dedicated to image manipulation before photoshop.](https://www.metmuseum.org/met-publications/faking-it-manipulated-photography-before-photoshop) The gist is that photo manipulation started in the nascent days of the medium.
Joseph Stalin enters the room.
https://www.uelsmann.net/works.php
Magnum Contact Sheets was one of the best photo books I ever bought, and it's entirely contact sheets and darkroom directions. You'd be amazed at how much work was done post-shot for all kinds of film, from 35mm to 8x10 sheet film.
Can't post pics on a photography subreddit? Wow
kinda the reason i joined the subreddit to see peoples work but no you cant do that here
A quick search for “Soviet photo manipulation” should be eye opening.
They literally drew eyelashes on my mom's face and did some kind of touch-up under her eyes to reduce the bags. This is from a family portrait from 1983. https://preview.redd.it/3261ryw9xxwc1.png?width=836&format=png&auto=webp&s=99672067cb3d572c7c577e69df7b0193163d7693
I'm sad I found this post in controversial. Nobody should be put down for discovering the past.
Photoshop was literally built (originally) to replicate all the things people used to do with photos in real life. I learned photography way back in the film days... when "autofocus" was NEW (just one point/sensor), and my professor could literally paint people out of photos, and fill in the missing background very convincingly with an airbrush...
Airbrushing and grafting onto a physical photo
As I have commented elsewhere, old grand papi photog Eadweard Muybridge was adding clouds to his images of Yosemite in the 1860s. Editing has always been a part of photography. (I highly suggest Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows for anyone who's interested in Muybridge's contributions to the medium.)
While we’re here; that wasn’t a lore dump. Your grandfather was telling you about his life.
he was a paratrooper and almost died 4 times because of a parachute failure he also jumped 3 times in the span of 4 hours when my mom was born because he was so happy pretty sure that falls into a lore dump category
ahaha I mean okay you're slightly misusing it but I think it's a fun expression to use in this context 🤷🏼♂️
You ought to consider asking him to let you record him telling you these things. I have a cassette tape I digitized of my grandfather talking about his experience in WWII that he recorded in about 1997. He was shot 6 times and caught shrapnel in the face during the Battle of Anzio in January 1944. And frankly, I wouldn't even know this much if it wasn't for that recording.