Retouching Before Photoshop

Neck retouching. Image credit: Complete self-instructing library of practical photography via Archive.org // Public Domain

“You’re going to 'Photoshop' that double chin, right?”

“Will you Photoshop me 10 years younger?”

Many of my clients' joke, but I find it astonishing how Photoshop has become a verb and a household concept. And how it has become so accepted in modern-day society. Although celebrities clearly ask not to be retouched, you can be sure that most images you see online and in magazines have had some work done.

But Photoshop has not been around forever.  You might think that retouching and photo manipulation became part of our lives only when digital photography arrived on the scene.  However, analogue photographers have been retouching for years before there was even thought of digital. From simple dodging and burning to actual removing blemishes and even a few extra kilos! How!? I’ll take you through a brief journey of retouching before Photoshop.

Ansel Adams

Many conversations or debates on retouching and photo manipulation will include the work of the famous Ansel Adams. Adams is known for his striking black and white landscapes with excellence in tone variety. He used dodging and burning while printing from negatives in the darkroom. While exposing the photo paper, he would dodge certain areas by usually using cardboard to shade an area and protect it from being exposed. This would result in a lighter section than the original. Or, he would burn by using cardboard with a small hole that let a ray of light through, which would expose the certain area to more light and make that section darker.

With purists, this was more acceptable than manipulating the negative as he was only creating what he saw with his own eyes while capturing the landscape. Our eyes are more sensitive and can differentiate between so many more shades than a negative or a digital camera, for that matter. Think about a scene you’re trying to photograph that might have an intense highlight as well as a deep shadow. Your eye can see the detail in both, but the highlight is too bright and or the shadow too dark when you take the picture. 

Retouching didn’t stop with correcting tonal inaccuracies, though. In 1846 the first known act of retouching was performed by Calvert Richard Jones when he removed the fifth figure from an image of five friars on a rooftop in Malta. Four were clustered together, but a fifth was standing separately and interrupted the scene in Jones’s view. He blotted out the negative paper figure by using India ink, which, in the positive print, added white sky where the fifth friar stood.

Since then, photographers and retouching specialists would scrape their film with knives, draw or paint on top of it and even paste multiple negatives together to create a single desired print. 

This form of etching became especially popular with portrait photographers for producing perfect images for their clients, from reducing waste lines to removing freckles and wrinkles. They could even correct squint eyes, fix crooked noses and remove stray hairs and wrinkles in dresses.

"Reducing size of stout subjects." Image credit: Complete self-instructing library of practical photography via Archive.org // Public Domain

There was and still is arguments about the ethics and appropriateness of extensive retouching in the modern-day. My take on it? I would remove everything that is not permanent, like pimples and sores, and then soften things that are, like wrinkles and scars. I believe that a person’s wrinkles, scars and blemishes tell their story, and if you take that away, you start taking away bits of that person, and you will be left with an empty shell.