- Portrait retouching photoshop manual#
- Portrait retouching photoshop portable#
- Portrait retouching photoshop series#
Retouchers used different “ touches” or “strokes” of the pencil-from crosshatching to spirals to dots-to solve different problems, but guides recommended a curved line for most situations. If a retoucher applied too much graphite or ink, he or she could dissolve the retouching medium using pure turpentine, wipe off the negative, apply more medium, and then try again. Most also applied a retouching medium, a liquid that usually had a base of turpentine mixed with balsam or gum and that offered the great advantage of being easily removable in case of mistakes. To roughen the surface enough to absorb color, the retoucher could very gently abrade the negative with finely powdered pumice stone or cuttlefish bone. But first, the retoucher had to prepare the surface of the negative so that the color would adhere. Once the retoucher had finished lightening certain areas, he or she would darken others using a hard graphite pencil, or a brush dipped in ink or watercolor. Image credit: Complete self-instructing library of practical photography via // Public Domain Others would retouch directly on the unvarnished negative, then add varnish over the retouching to seal it.
Some photographers then varnished their negatives, adding a protective coating before they began retouching. After a negative had been exposed and had captured an image, the photographer would use chemicals in a darkroom to develop and then “fix” it, so that it was no longer sensitive to light. The retouching process began the same way regardless of the type of negative being altered.
Portrait retouching photoshop manual#
Both of these processes used glass negatives that were well-suited to manual retouching, also known as “handwork.” Large-scale glass negatives were the rule during the 19th century plastic negatives became popular after 1913 and were manually retouched with the same techniques used on glass.
Portrait retouching photoshop portable#
These “wet plate” negatives had to be both exposed and developed within 10 minutes, so they required photographers to use portable darkrooms.īy 1880, the so-called dry plate process-in which a glass plate coated with gelatin and a silver bromide emulsion could be left to dry and then used later-had become the leading photographic method, thanks to its convenience. To create a negative, the photographer would coat a glass plate with a substance called collodion, then bathe it in silver nitrate to make it light-sensitive before finally placing it in the camera. Image credit: Roy Boshi via Wikimedia // CC BY-SA 3.0įrom its invention in 1851 through the 1870s, the wet collodion process was the most popular method of developing photographs. Public enthusiasm for the practice has risen and fallen in waves, but retouching has been an integral part of photography ever since that fateful day in 1846. And just like today, photographers and cultural critics of the 19th and 20th centuries debated the ethics of retouching. 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 print. Retouching has therefore been around almost as long as photography itself, but instead of taking place on a computer, as it does now, it originally took place on the negative. In the positive print, the place where the fifth friar had stood became white sky. Jones, or an associate, didn’t like the way this fifth friar was interrupting the scene, and so blotted out the figure on the paper negative using some India ink. Jones had taken a photograph of five Capuchin friars on a rooftop in Malta, but while four of the friars were clustered together talking in a group, the fifth hovered a few feet behind them, framed awkwardly against the sky. Just five years later, in 1846, the first known act of photographic retouching was performed by a Welsh colleague of Talbot’s named Calvert Richard Jones, or perhaps by one of Jones’s associates. In 1841, the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot patented the calotype-the first practical photographic process to create a negative that could generate multiple copies.
Portrait retouching photoshop series#
This is the first installment in a short series of articles on photo manipulation in the days before computers.
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