Photoshopping Before Photoshop
First Photographs
The earliest known surviving photograph made in a camera was taken by Joseph Niépce in either 1826 or 1827. The photograph shows the view from an upstairs window at Niépce’s home in the Burgundy region of France.
The first photograph was captured by a chemically coated pewter plate being inserted into a camera obscure and being left to expose for all east 8 hours. The plate was then washed with a mixture of lavender oil and petroleum. The result was the permanent direct positive picture on the plate.
The First Photograph of a Person
The first photograph to feature a person was taken by Louis Daguerre in 1838.
The photograph was from a window overlooking the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, but due to the ten-minute exposure time no movement could be captured, meaning no one walking would be picked up by the camera. Though, there are two men that can be seen in the bottom left corner of the photograph. It is believed one is shining the shoes of the other – with both of them seemingly unaware they were becoming part of history.
Daguerre invented the daguerreotype, which is a remarkably detailed, one-of-a-kind photographic image. It is created on a highly polished, silver-plated sheet of copper, sensitized with iodine vapors, exposed in a large box camera, developed in mercury fumes, and stabilized with salt water.
Daguerre and Niépce
Louis Daguerre met Nicéphore Niépce in Paris on his way to England in December 1827. Niépce was fascinated by the Daguerre’s Diorama, and Daguerre also had had the idea to capture the images of the camera obscura. In 1829, Daguerre had formed a partnership with Niépce to work on the same problem both were experiencing—how to make a permanent image using light and chemistry.
Niépce died in 1833, but the partners had yet to come up with a practical, reliable process. Daguerre continued the research, somewhat with Niépce’s son, but mostly by himself.
Both men are considered essential founders of photography.
Louis Daguerre (Left), Nicéphore Niépce (Right)
Manipulated Photographs Before Photoshop
The seemingly automatic recording of an image by photography had given the process a sense of authenticity shared by no other picture-making technique at the time. The photograph possesses, in the popular mind at the time, such apparent accuracy that the saying “the camera does not lie” had became an accepted, if erroneous, cliché.
The urge to modify camera images is as old as photography itself—only the methods have changed. Nearly every type of manipulation we now associate with digital photography was also part of the medium's pre-digital repertoire: smoothing away wrinkles, slimming waistlines, adding people to a scene (or removing them)—even fabricating events that never took place.
This international loan exhibition traces the history of manipulated photography from the 1840s through the early 1990s, when the computer replaced manual techniques as the dominant means of doctoring photographs. Most of the two hundred pictures on view were altered after the negative was exposed—through photomontage, combination printing, overpainting, retouching, or, as is often the case, a blend of several processes.
History & Origin of Photoshop Tools
If you've spent any time in Photoshop editing your images, you'll have noticed a "dodging" and "burning" tools. They are used for making an image lighter and darker respectively, but why the odd icons? Why is there a lollypop and a fist as part of your Photoshop tool palette?
As you may have guessed, it's a hangover from the darkroom days - and it's a technique that is great fun to play with if you're ever printing your own images.
The Ghost in the Stereoscope,
In Olden Times, if Folks Were Good, the Stork Would Bring a Baby Sweet and Fair,
[Man in Bottle],
How a Darkroom Enlarger Works
A darkroom enlarger is sort of like a camera, but 'backwards'. In a camera, you have a lens that gathers light and projects it onto a film plane. A darkroom enlarger also has a lens, and the film is pretty much in the same place as in a camera, but a light bulb is placed on the opposite side of the lens. By turning the light bulb on, the lens 'projects' an enlargement of the image onto photographic paper.
You can then choose a longer or shorter exposure (which turns the lamp on for longer / shorter). You can also select a different aperture on the projection lens, which has much the same effect as on your camera: A smaller aperture requires a longer exposure, etc.
To determine how light or dark your print is going to be, you choose an 'exposure' by choosing how sensitive the paper is you are using, you choose an aperture, and a 'shutter speed'. Just like with your camera, it's possible to over- or under-expose your image at this point.
Dodging
While your paper is being exposed by the light, you could make some portions of the image lighter by moving the dodge tool between the lens and the paper. Traditionally, the dodge tool is a piece of black paper on a thin stick - which, when seen in silhouette, looks a little bit like a lollypop. This is why the icon in Photoshop appears to look like a lollypop.
Darkroom Dodging Techniques
Photoshop Dodge tool
Burning
When burning, you would use a tool that would block some light, but let some light through.The areas you are 'burning' will come out darker: more light on the paper causes the print to be darker.
For the burning process, it is useful to have a tool where you can easily change the aperture (i.e. the size of the hole that lets the light through) - and it turns out that your hand is the perfect tool. By changing the shape of your hand, you can make a small hole for the light to pass through for fine work, or you can create quite a big hole, for darkening larger parts of the image. Hence the hand icon in Photoshop!
Darkroom Burning Techniques
Photoshop Burn tool
Check out this Video Created for Photoshop's 25th Anniversary:
Cottingley Fairies Hoax
"In 1920 a series of photos of fairies captured the attention of the world. The photos had been taken by two young girls, the cousins Frances Griffith and Elsie Wright, while playing in the garden of Elsie's Cottingley village home. Photographic experts examined the pictures and declared them genuine. Spiritualists promoted them as proof of the existence of supernatural creatures, and despite criticism by skeptics, the pictures became among the most widely recognized photos in the world. It was only decades later, in the late 1970s, that the photos were definitively debunked.”
Check Out This Video That Tells the Story of the Cottingley Fairies