Photoshop (LO1, LO2)
Photoshop is a software for image editing, photo retouching, graphic design and digital art. Photo retouching didn’t start with Photoshop as many of us think. Digital retouching is relatively new, but analog post-processing was created in the beginning of 19th century.
There were a number of techniques that were used in the darkroom – dodging and burning, scratching the negatives, vibrating while exposing, blurring, airbrushing, painting the negatives, colouring; Photo-montage, or combination printing, was used to manipulate records of historical events or to create painting-like imagery. All these works, they did in the darkroom of the studio spending a lot of time. There was always the chance of errors. That’s why most of the Dark Room Manipulators used to work on a copy of the master negative.
In 1860, a photograph of the politician John Calhoun was manipulated and his body was used in another photograph with the head of the president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. This photo credits itself as the first manipulated photo.
Portrait of actress Joan Crawford taken by George Hurrell, 1931
The first experiments began in the 1860s
Already in the 1910s, commercial studios offered a manipulation editing service of joining some people that were not able to come for taking the group portrait.
I found this amazing video on film photography before Photoshop.
Photoshop practice
My first image is in a raw format I captured on my camera when practising at home. As every raw file the image is very flat. On the second image I used photoshop to manage vibrace, brightness and other attributes to bring the image to a life.
1/100s, f/14, ISO 100, zoom lens 100-400mm, f/4.5-5.6S
As I mentioned earlier I usually use Lightroom for editing my images. This time I am practising Photoshop. For comparison you can see the first image before editing and the second image using Photoshop.
What have I used? I adjusted Exposure, Brightness, Curves, Vibrance by using tools like Lasso, Object selection, Healing brush and others.
Source: Course materials; internet; Youtube
