Just how edited Prints were?

One thing that gets me very annoyed are people who say “I never edit my images”; “I only ever shoot straight out of camera”; “I don’t believe in photoshop/Lightroom etc”.

These people are in my opinion limiting their photography when I came to photography in the early 1980’s in was all film and a lot of that was film black and white and when you take the time to learn about darkroom techniques you are able to really get the best out of an image.

As the article on the PetaPixel blog shows photographers went to great length in the darkroom to achieve the best result – they did simply get the finished print and drop off at the chemist and be happy with the results of the commercial printing process – which then would have been the equivalent of using the straight out of camera JPEG.

Lightroom/Photoshop etc are powerful tools that can do many such as airbrush models skin, build composite images, fundamentally change colour in an image or even completely remove an item. I agree that some of these tools push the boundries of I guess grass roots photography, but they need not been. If we use it like a digital darkroom.

Darkroom techniques, as you can see from the PetaPixel article show, were dodging (hold exposure back) and burn (increasing exposure) in certain areas of a print to make the best use of the dynamic range that particularly Black and white print film (usually +/- 4 stops) could produce.Similar techniques were used when printing colour negatives and when making prints from colour reversal film (slides) although these were less forgiving on exposure latitude.

There we also darkroom techniques to play with the colour of images and contrasts pushing or pulling the processing of black & white film i.e. rating the film and a higher ISO and adjust developing time to effect contrast and grain. Cross processing of film i.e. developing colour reversal film with colour negative chemistry – his again increased contrast and gave surreal colours.

None of these techniques are “cheats”, that is they are not getting away from the skill of the photographer “to get it right in camera” no amount of photoshop and make a bad photograph good (although I have come across many photographers who is snap away and rely on Photoshop) they just simply enhance as photographers have been doing for generations.

References

Zheng, M. (2013). Marked Up Photographs Show How Iconic Prints Were Edited in the Darkroom. [online] PetaPixel. Available at: https://petapixel.com/2013/09/12/marked-photographs-show-iconic-prints-edited-darkroom/ [Accessed 29 Jan. 2018].