Life Without Photoshop

Life without Photoshop has got to be unthinkable in the world of graphics and imaging these days, so this page must be subversive and only for iconoclasts or historians.

All the images on this page were created without a touch of the computer.

People starting in photography today will only be in a digital world and will hardly know what film is.

So how did anyone manage before Photoshop came along?

The early days of photography produced a wealth of inventive techniques, each with its own unique style and appearance.
Many of these methods produced archival prints which just would not fade.

A few of these processes are:

• Albumen printing
  
• Bromoil
  
• Carbon printing
  
• Cyanotype
  
• Dageurreotypes
  
• Gum printing
  
• Photo etching
  
• Platinum printing
  
• Salt printing
  
• Van Dyke prints

The old processes used such items as salt, egg, gum arabic, carbon powder, gold, mercury, platinum, a large variety of chemicals, silver nitrate and hand-made papers.

Solarizing is another technique which the digital world has copied from the era of film.

Following a strict procedure, film or printing paper would be re-exposed by light while being developed, resulting in a partial reversal of the image, as with the image on the right.

• Grain-free 'Pan F' and 'Kodachrome'

• Faster films with their unique grain textures

• Black and white Infra-red – all grain and snowy whites
  
• Colour Infra-red and the wild changes of colours with different filters

• High speed 'Recording' film with its strong grain and strong tones

• Various colour stock with muted colours

• The over-saturated colours from Fuji.

The adventurous can emulate these effects in Photoshop.

Films might be baked in the oven prior to exposure, or repeatedly immersed in hot and cold water during processing to cracked the emulsion for reticulation effect.

Processing of films could be varied away from the norm to bend the results.

Such method was cross-processing; processing transparency film in colour negative chemicals or processing colour neg in E6 chemicals.

There is a weak attempt to recreate cross-processing in the Curves dialogue box – one of the Presets is 'Cross Process'.

One of the beauties of some of these wet systems was, and still is for a few die-hards, the happy accidents.
When an accident happened it all became a part of the creative process, invoking the ancient proverb "Honour thine error as a hidden intention".
Results might vary with each attempt which created a spontaneity not found with computer work.

With printing, cross-processing and solarization, the result can be made different every time.
These unexpected results could be used and extended and became something unique.

It is in this way, that there are some things which can be done with traditional methods which cannot be done with digital manipulation.
Sure an image can be copied on the computer,
but it cannot be originated in quite the same manner.

In-camera tricks were the stock-in-trade for many photographers, particularly those using large format plate cameras. The ground glass screen made it possible to line up different scenes and overlap them accurately.

In the 1980s, front projection became popular with advertizing photographers. They were the only ones who could afford the gear, which was around £6000 just for the projection system and screen - camera extra. One experienced user of this system was quoted as saying that anyone who was not using front projection for special effects was going to get left behind. At the same time, some makes of digital imaging were coming up on the outside and Photoshop appeared around 1990.

Movement and motion blur are effects that Photoshop can reproduce very successfully. Movement created in a camera, however, can look rather different. Anyone who wants to replicate movement should be very familiar with how it looks when done as an original photograph in order to produce a result that looks genuine.

The image of the polo player illustrates this. The trees have horizontal blur and so do parts of the horse and rider. Certain parts of the image have rotation. The mallet is moving up and down; the legs are moving in curves and sometimes in a circular motion.

Hitting such an image with the Motion Blur filter will give blur but it will be far from accurate. Using Photoshop, various parts of the image would have to be treated differently. Better still, do it the old fashion way and take the photograph with a slow shutter speed.

Post-production without Photoshop meant retouching prints or retouching film. With prints, objects were removed with scalpel, brushes and dyes. Faces were treated the same way.
Kodak made a set of retouching dyes for changing colours in prints and on transparencies.
Major changes could be made to transparencies with a technique called emulsion stripping. It was very much a secret black-art process of peeling off part of the emulsion and attaching it to another image.

In the 1970s, a large vodka producer had a series of high-profile slightly surreal adverts. One featured a group of sky-divers in a circle falling through the air. Among the circle was a woman wearing a bikini and snorkel gear, holding a glass of vodka. In fact they were all photographed as a group on the ground, lying on scaffolding to get the right positioning.
In the laboratory the scaffolding and ground were removed and replaced with sky and clouds, using the emulsion stripping technique.

If there is anyone still left using such techniques,
they will certainly be a rare beast.



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