A History of Photo Manipulation: From Pencil on Glass to Neural Networks

The notion that photography was once honest and computers ruined it does not survive inspection. Pictures were corrected from the medium's first decades — simply by hand, and slowly.

The nineteenth century: pencil and scalpel

Retouchers worked directly on the negative: softening lines with a pencil, scraping emulsion defects away with a blade. Portrait studios kept retouchers on staff, and the quality of their work was a competitive advantage on a par with the lens.

Printing and combination

Combination printing allowed one print to be assembled from several negatives: sky from one, landscape from another. The device served both art and forgery, long before anything digital existed.

The later twentieth century

Airbrush, dodging and burning at the enlarger, laboratory work. It remained manual and expensive, and was therefore applied selectively — to covers and advertising rather than to everything.

The digital era

Layers and brushes in graphics editors made retouching universal. The barrier to entry fell to nothing, and practically everything published became processed.

What neural networks changed

Not the possibility of altering images but the labour required. A convincing substitution once took a specialist weeks — which was itself a filter. Now the same thing takes minutes and no skill.

Hence the shift in the question. Arguing about whether a photograph has been processed became pointless — nearly all of them have. What acquired weight is a different question: who made the change, and with whose consent.

This material is intended for adults over 18 and is informational in nature.