History of Photo Manipulation
From the introduction of photography in 1826 till today, technology has greatly evolved. From the camera obscura, to the single lens reflex, the twin lens reflex to the digital single lens reflex. Along with the evolution of camera, post production and image manipulation processes have been developed and evolved over time.
Photo editing began long before Photoshop. By 1878, two photo processes were invented, the wet plate collodion process which was followed by the gelatin-silver process. At this point in history, photographers could only manipulation their images in the darkroom. Some photographers retouched their negatives before preserving them by vanishing them to protect them from damage, while others preferred to vanish their negatives before retouching them. However, it is to be noted that retouching was a costly process.
By the early 1900s, commercial studios offered a service to manipulate images by joining people together who could not come to the studio to get their portrait taken. Agencies used several separate photographs to accomplish this purpose. By 1937, it was possible to completely remove a person from an image, just as the Content Aware tool does in Photoshop. In 1989, collaging a person’s head with someone else body was possible.
By 2009, computer programs had made it easier to manipulate images, such as making it possible to insert a person into an image.
The evolution of technology has made the task of retouching easier for the photographer, with programs such as Photoshop and Lightroom being accessible on any desktop device. Photo manipulation is becoming easier and identifying images that are not retouched is becoming more difficult. The trick to photo manipulation is to make it as subtle as possible and not cross any ethical lines.