The Evolution of Image Editing
The editing process of photography has transitioned from labour-intensive darkroom techniques to sophisticated digital tools accessible through handheld devices. This progression reflects technological innovation and a profound change in capturing, altering, and disseminating visual narratives. Chemical processes and manual adjustments have given way to instantaneous computational photography, enabling global participation in image creation and manipulation. From the meticulous hand-colouring of 19th-century portraits to the AI-driven algorithms of modern smartphones, each era has redefined the boundaries of visual expression. The journey underscores technological advancements and the enduring human desire to shape perception through imagery.
The Darkroom Era: Origins of Photo Manipulation
Photographic manipulation traces its origins to the 1860s, exemplified by an anonymous artist’s composite portrait of Abraham Lincoln, which combined the president’s head with the body of John C. Calhoun. This early instance underscores that the impulse to alter reality through photography emerged alongside the medium itself. By the late 19th century, techniques such as dodging, burning, and masking became staples in darkrooms, allowing photographers to lighten or darken areas of a print selectively. These methods demanded mastery of chemical baths, enlargers, and precision tools, with practitioners often spending hours perfecting a single image.
Jerry Uelsmann's innovative techniques in the darkroom profoundly influenced modern digital photography, particularly in the realm of photo manipulation and creative expression. His mastery of analogue processes, such as blending multiple negatives and using up to twelve enlargers, anticipated many features now commonplace in digital editing software like Photoshop. Uelsmann's concept of "post-visualisation," where the creative process extended beyond the camera's shutter click, challenged traditional notions of photography as a purely documentary medium.
Influence on Digital Techniques: Uelsmann's intricate darkroom methods, including dodging, burning, masking, and layering negatives, laid the groundwork for the digital tools replicating these processes today. His ability to seamlessly combine disparate elements into surreal compositions mirrors Photoshop's layering system and advanced masking capabilities. For example, his approach to creating dreamlike landscapes with symbolic and psychological resonance is echoed in contemporary digital workflows that enable photographers to construct imaginative visual narratives easily.
Expanding Artistic Boundaries: By rejecting the idea that photographs must represent reality as captured by a single negative, Uelsmann expanded the artistic possibilities of photography. His work demonstrated that photography could be a medium for creating entirely new realities rather than merely documenting existing ones. This philosophy has inspired digital artists to push creative boundaries, using software to craft surreal imagery that challenges viewers' perceptions.
Legacy in Modern Photography: Uelsmann's influence is evident in the widespread adoption of photomontage and composite imaging techniques in digital photography. His work reminds us that technical mastery should support artistic vision rather than dictate it. While Uelsmann himself remained committed to analogue processes, his pioneering methods resonate strongly in today's digital era, where photographers can achieve similar results in minutes using computational tools.
In essence, Jerry Uelsmann bridged the gap between traditional darkroom artistry and modern digital innovation, inspiring generations of photographers to explore new ways of seeing and representing their world. His legacy continues to shape contemporary practices in photo manipulation and creative storytelling.
Hand-Colouring and Manual Retouching
Before colour photography, artists enhanced black-and-white images with hand-applied paints, dyes, or inks—this practice, prevalent in 19th-century portrait photography, aimed to produce lifelike representations. Skilled colourists used translucent oils or watercolours to tint cheeks, gild jewellery, and simulate fabric textures, often working under magnifying lenses to achieve minute details. The process demanded an understanding of tonal gradations; over-saturation could flatten dimensionality, while subtle hues required layering multiple washes. In Britain, studios like those in London’s Regent Street offered hand-coloured cartes de visite, transforming sepia-toned portraits into cherished family heirlooms.
Retouching, performed directly on negatives or prints, involved tools like etching knives, lead pencils, and fine brushes to refine textures or adjust lighting. Practitioners developed methods to “dodge” imperfections—scraping emulsion from negatives to lighten areas—or “burn” additional exposure onto prints to deepen shadows. The airbrush revolutionised this craft by enabling seamless pigment application, particularly for portrait retouching. The first practical airbrush, initially called an "atomizer," was patented in 1876 by Francis Edgar Stanley, a photographer, inventor, portrait painter, and businessman, for use in retouching photographs. By the 1890s, studios employed specialists to remove blemishes, whiten teeth, and even alter facial structures, anticipating modern beauty standards.
The technique gained political significance during the 1930s under Stalin’s regime, where state-sanctioned retouchers erased disfavoured figures from historical photographs. Factories dedicated to photographic manipulation emerged, staffed by technicians who meticulously airbrushed propaganda materials, altering historical records to align with ideological narratives. Conversely, artists like John Heartfield subverted these tools for dissent, creating photomontages that critiqued fascism through jarring juxtapositions.
In a portrait with Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution and founder of the USSR, Stalin took photo editing to new heights. The two appear friendly, intimating that Stalin is the heir apparent—in reality, the photograph is heavily reworked. According to the Met Museum, “retouchers smoothed Stalin’s pockmarked complexion, lengthened his shrivelled left arm, and increased his stature so that Lenin seems to recede benignly… in a letter dictated around the time the picture was taken, Lenin described Stalin as intolerably rude and capricious and recommended that he be removed from his position as the Communist Party’s secretary general.”
During the 1930s, retouching went from the somewhat innocent act of blurring facial imperfections to the pernicious practice of falsifying reality. In the later years of Stalin’s tenure, those who ran afoul of the Soviet leader were simply erased. The man standing to Stalin's left was Nikolai Yezhov, the former head of the NKVD (Soviet secret police during Stalin's rule). He started and oversaw the infamous Great Purge of the 1930s, but after being replaced as NKVD head by Beria, he was arrested, imprisoned, and executed. Afterwards, Stalin ordered the Soviet press to remove Yezhov from all photos as he was previously a very well-known government official before his downfall.
The Digital Revolution Begins
The shift from analogue to digital photography began with Michael Francis Tompsett’s 1972 colour digital photograph, created using CCD sensor technology. This innovation laid the groundwork for modern digital imaging by converting light into electrical signals, replacing chemical reactions with binary data. In 1975, Steven Sasson of Eastman Kodak developed the first portable digital camera. Weighing 3.6 kilograms, it captured black-and-white images at 0.01 megapixels, recording onto cassette tape with a 23-second exposure time. Though rudimentary, Sasson’s prototype demonstrated the feasibility of electronic image capture, prompting sceptical reactions from film-centric executives.
Nasir Ahmed’s 1972 discrete cosine transform (DCT) became foundational for the JPEG standard, introduced in 1992. This compression algorithm revolutionised digital storage by reducing file sizes without perceptible quality loss, enabling efficient transmission over early internet connections. Concurrently, Gerard Holzmann of Bell Labs coined the term ‘digital darkroom’ to describe software replicating traditional techniques like dodging and burning through pixel-based adjustments. Early adopters faced steep learning curves, transitioning from tactile darkroom tools to abstracted software interfaces.
The Birth of the Digital Darkroom
Before digital cameras, scanners like the 1989 Barneyscanner digitised 35mm slides for display on computers. The accompanying software, Barneyscan XP, introduced features such as histogram adjustment and gamma correction, which Adobe later licensed and rebranded as Photoshop 1.0 in 1990. Inspired by celluloid animation techniques, Photoshop's layering system allowed non-destructive edits—a paradigm shift from irreversible darkroom processes. Professionals now composite images with precision, blending elements from multiple sources into seamless wholes.
A typical digital darkroom requires formidable hardware: Sun Microstations with 24-bit colour depth, calibrated CRT monitors, and SCSI-based storage solutions. By the late 1990s, advancements in CCD sensors and colour management systems enabled digital cameras like the Nikon D1 to rival film resolution, capturing 2.74-megapixel images suitable for newsprint. Yet many photographers resisted, citing digital’s “clinical” aesthetics and unreliable archival properties compared to silver halide’s proven longevity.
From Film to Digital Cameras
Transitioning from film to digital posed technical and philosophical challenges. Early devices like the 1990 Logitech Fotoman offered 376 × 284-pixel monochrome images stored on internal RAM. The Fotoman Plus’s adoption of JPEG ensured cross-system compatibility, albeit at 0.1 megapixels—a resolution dwarfed by contemporaneous 35mm film7. By 1994, Apple’s QuickTake 100 democratised digital capture with VGA-resolution colour, though its $749 price limited adoption to early adopters.
Professionals faced a hybrid landscape: digital offered immediate feedback and cost savings on film stock, yet early systems struggled with dynamic range and colour fidelity. Photojournalists, enticed by the ability to transmit images via satellite phones, embraced devices like the Kodak DCS 460, while portraitists remained loyal to medium-format film’s nuanced tonality. The convergence came in 1999 with Nikon’s D1, a 2.74-megapixel SLR that matched film’s practicality for deadline-driven workflows.
The Mobile Photography Revolution
Early camera phones prioritised convenience over quality, yet their ubiquity transformed photography into a spontaneous, everyday activity. The 2002 Sharp J-SH04 introduced a 0.1-megapixel CCD, enabling blurry but instantaneous captures. By 2010, the iPhone 4’s 5-megapixel sensor and LED flash redefined expectations, pairing hardware with iOS apps like Hipstamatic for retro-styled edits. Apps like Snapseed and Lightroom Mobile have enabled high-quality and versatile editing on our handheld devices.
Modern smartphones leverage computational photography to overcome physical limitations. Google’s Night Sight, introduced in 2018, uses AI to align and merge multiple underexposed frames, extracting detail from near-darkness. Apple’s Deep Fusion employs neural engines to analyse pixel-level data, optimising texture and noise reduction in medium-light conditions. These techniques mimic darkroom principles—dodging, burning, and compositing—but execute them in milliseconds through tensor processing units.
As seen in Huawei’s P40, AI-driven scene recognition automatically adjusts settings for over 1,500 scenarios, from sunsets to supermarket aisles. Samsung’s Space Zoom combines optical and AI-enhanced digital zoom, using multi-frame super-resolution to maintain clarity at 100x magnification. Meanwhile, Adobe’s Sensei AI automates labour-intensive tasks like sky replacement and facial retouching, echoing the hand-colourist’s artistry through machine learning.
Photoleap, a smartphone app from Lightricks, uses Stable Diffusion AI for text-to-image generation, background removal, object erasure and photo refinement, along with layer-based editing, AI filters and motion effects. Images can be iteratively adjusted using predefined themes and further edited within the app, enabling detailed adjustments to composition, filters and elements. Designed for diverse applications—from social media content to professional projects—the app combines generative AI with practical editing functions to simplify complex workflows.
Ethical Considerations and Future Directions
The democratisation of editing tools raises ethical questions. AI’s ability to generate hyper-realistic deepfakes or alter landscapes undetectably challenges notions of photographic truth. Initiatives like the Content Authenticity Initiative propose metadata standards to track edits, reinstating accountability in the computational age.
The line between professional and amateur gear blurs as smartphone sensors approach medium-format resolution and quantum dot filters expand dynamic range. Emerging technologies like neural radiance fields (NeRFs) promise 3D scene reconstruction from 2D images, potentially revolutionising fields from archaeology to virtual production.
The transformation from darkroom to smartphone encapsulates a pivotal shift in visual media. Once a specialised craft, photography has become an instantaneous, universal medium for storytelling. From Jerry Uelsmann’s analogue composites to AI-enhanced smartphone imagery, this evolution reflects an enduring human desire to capture and share our world. As smartphone capabilities approach professional standards, the distinction between amateur and expert continues to fade, profoundly reshaping visual communication. Yet core principles endure—the interplay of light and shadow, the pursuit of narrative, and the timeless urge to shape perception through the lens.
Resources
Here’s a fascinating video from Bernadette Banner that looks at the surprisingly extensive use of photo manipulation in portraiture during Victorian and Edwardian times. It seems that pretty much everyone was doing it…
And this video, from DigitalRev In-Focus, gives a brief insight into the origins of Photoshop, and is “dedicated to anyone who has ever frantically scrolled through the history menu, tooled around with layer styles for hours on end or been baffled by the pen tool.”
