Kids these days! With their fancy new fan-dangled Photoshop skills! Them mouse clickin’ whippersnappers! Don’t they know that when I was a kid I had to use a DARKROOM and I had to DRAW ON PHOTOS to make ‘em look good? Of course, this was all after I had to walk to the darkroom uphill – both ways – in 5 feet of snow!
Seriously though, we’ve come a long way, baby. There was a time when your editor came to you with a photo – one photo – for your layout, and no matter how craptacular that photo was you had to make it work. Sure, there were things that could be handled in the darkroom, but the darkroom had its limitations. Usually you wound up at a light table with a print of your photo, some markers or paint and your steady hand drawing in the details.
This practice really was standard operating procedure in the print industry, and not just a propaganda tool used by evil dictators. Why did we do this? Well, because the craptacular photo had to have a screen put over it eventually in order for it to be printed and that would cause it to lose a lot of the detail and contrast, thus making it look even more craptacular than the original.
An image of the Pioneer Mother and Liberty Memorial that was used for a story that was printed in the Kansas City Star back in 1965.
[click to enlarge image]
Recently, Derek Donovan of the Kansas City Star wrote about a photo he came across in the paper’s archives (above) that illustrates just how much, uh, illustration was used back in the day…
While looking through some of The Star’s photo archives this morning, I came across this image, which was published in 1965. At that time, the presses used to print newspapers were not capable of very fine detail in photographs. So to make the objects in images discernable, it was common practice to actually paint on top of a raw print, then photograph that finished product for publication.
The image you see here is probably the most heavily-overpainted example I’ve ever found in the archives. … Ostensibly a picture of the Pioneer Mother and Liberty Memorial, you can see that very little of the resultant image was actually captured by the camera’s lens. Every bit of the Pioneer Mother and the Memorial are pure paint, as are the beams of light and the “snow” piled around the base of the statue. The trees at the right have been enhanced meticulously.
There’s a clipping of the actual paper taped to the back of the photo, and it shows that the final printed result didn’t look nearly as painterly.
If photo retouching prior to the Photoshop era interests you, please check back tomorrow because there’s more to come! (Update: You can find that post here.)
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