150-year-old Advanced Photo Manipulation

This makes one think a little more before posting this........

Pics, or it didn't happen!

Great thread OP.

Im now interested how they achieved altering them older photos,what methods and such.
Something i shall look into.

Also thanks for the link and laughs Welshextremist.

Cheers

reply to post by midwest


S&F
This is amazing to me. I'm a graphics designer and work with photoshop type software everyday, I can do pretty cool manipulations but to do manipulations with 100 year old tech...to me, that's impressive. Have you noticed how grainier the shopped pics are? It explains awhole lot. I've seen picture on plate that were about 100 years old and I always wondered how come my "poor" great grandparents were able to get better pics than professional, government appointed photographers...now I know. Great post!

Cool thread!

Let's not forget this more recent example

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/2b4a1b270605.jpg[/atsimg]

reply to post by midwest


I think you just altered the fake photos so that they will look real here.

Originally posted by ProphecyPhD
This is like ancient technology, Stuff that man has been doing for centuries but "modern" people swear they invented it and it was impossible before.

Always thinking outside the box. too bad there arnt more people like you on here. Star for you.

Originally posted by boncho
reply to post by midwest

 

Great post OP. It can never be pointed out too many times that: If you thought about it... Someone else did first.

Isn't that a logical fallacy? That would be like effectively stating no one was ever first.

Regardless interesting thread!

wow. unbelievable, well, unbelievable in the fact that I feel I can no longer trust photos from history I wonder if there are any instances, or cases/example of an "adobe after-effects" kind? i.e. old film manipulation. First thing I think of when I think of photo alteration, and points of contention is world war II. I won't touch that with a ten foot pole though.

Bravo great thread...dabbling in Photography and graphics myself I have become very jaded to photographic evidence and now even video evidence (thank you District 9 with cheap but awesome effects). I will pretty much only believe it if I see it…which even then who knows what they can do with holography or mass brain audio/visual hallucinations LOL.

I WANT(ED) TO BELIEVE

I didn't think they could do this that far back, kind of makes you wonder how many people got locked away or had their lives ruined by a picture.

S&F

Thank you for the information. This does not surprise me one bit. Fn crooked government officials, and wannabe officials.

After reading this thread, I am going to assume that they are really editing live television instantly on the go. This is'nt just about photos, tv is pretty much the main propaganda tool these days. Now it is all digital?????????

Oh well, people would argue that that is too difficult to do. I know that if I got paid good money and was told to keep my mouth shut and do the job, I would.

ETA: I do realize that since the Janet Jackson incident on live tv "they" have taken "steps" to prevent that from happening. But I am talking inserting video from one thing into another on live tv, without us noticing.

I've had a photography class in high school in the early 1990's, so I knew a bit about this subject. Some projects in the class involved fakery and manipulation using film-process methods, it's part of knowing the art. (This was about a decade before digital cameras were good enough to use and commonly available/affordable, so everything was done with film.) Photoshop and digital photography makes this kind of stuff sooo much easier.

Usually this is just done on the paper and not the negatives. (But there is a process where a negative can be made from a positive or something like that. It's been a long while so I can't recall everything other than the steps seem a little convoluted. There are also multiple exposure methods for taking pictures, if you plan at the camera stage.) What makes it hard is that you have to mask off the photo paper while it's under the enlarger for each item you want to manipulate into the image. So to add a person you mask off the position where they were, then you expose the background... Then after doing that you mask off the background and do it the other way around. There's also dodging, which means moving some shade over the paper while it's being exposed under the enlarger. The difficulty is that if you don't mask and dodge right to match exposures or have edges match up, its much easier for the fakery to be obvious.

(From what I understand, the same process for photo-paper could also be used on a glass plate in the lithography process before going to print. But the class never did that. BTW, photo-manipulation when it comes to marketing is nothing new either.)

Since it's B/W and dealing with the print and not the negative, you can get away with red-lights in the darkroom so you can watch how things develop and such... There's also ways to slow or accelerate the process before fixing the print. Again, that's part of matching up exposures.

Nice fun with chemicals that smell funny and have things like silver nitrate or cyanide in them...
And to get a feel for it while fumbling around in dark conditions you can't always wear rubber gloves, and paper cuts really sting and burn... Of course you also learn to wash your hands really good.

Amazing how much was done before there was photoshop, considering how much harder it was. Some people in the past were really good at this stuff too. Better at it than their modern counterparts. (Photoshop does make it easier for the lazy.) But when there's a will there's a way, and for a long time that was the only way.

reply to post by midwest


i thought we tend to look at tools used and not the results to define progress. faster easier cheaper not always superior it all depends on how you look at it

Let this thread be lesson to all of those who would use the phrase:

"Pics or it didnt happen"

It appears in some cases its actually:

"Pics and it didnt happen"

reply to post by midwest


Mixing two pieces of film together was the olden way to photoshop. Done with many pictures, most of them by the old newspaper companies back then.

Great post! Wanted to add that many early photographs, like those from the U.S. Civil War era, were staged, to tell a better story and make them more appealing to viewers. Guys like Alexander Gardner took battlefield photo's so they could charge a paying audience to view them, and had no problem with moving dead bodies and equipment around to make a better picture.

For example, " A Sharpshooter's Last Sleep", a picture Gardner took after Gettysburg, appears to show a dead Confederate sniper in position as he died, but a subsequent picture shows the same dead body positioned in a rock outcropping and titled "Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter".
Museum of Hoaxes

Our photographic history is not one of pure documentation or truth. Even if one leaves the subject as it is, exactly as found, the person behind the camera has chosen the angle, distance, lighting, and field, has composed a small piece of reality with an agenda and narrative. Pictures tell a thousand words, and none of them "true".

Fantastic and enlightening post, op!
Being as how it involves two of my favorite subjects- photo manipulation and history- I'm giving you a S & F, with a big !

My Dad worked in Fleet Street after WW2. His official job was "photo retouching", but mainly consisted of compositing photographs to produce the right results for editors to include with stories. A lot (*A LOT*) of pictures that appeared showed people that had never really met, events that never happened, things that didn't exist, and yet others that were made to disappear from history. The technique was known in the trade as Hammersmithing.

Originally posted by TXRabbit
Cool thread!

Let's not forget this more recent example

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/2b4a1b270605.jpg[/atsimg]

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That's the exact photo I was going to mention! This (Oswald photo) was the first photo I viewed that I knew had been tampered with.
Thanks for this thread, OP. I did not realize photo tampering had been occurring for such a long time. Star for you.

Really interesting stuff there... I wonder how they achieved all that.
I wouldn't be to sure about the fake-image spotter though, I just sense that soooomeone is going to tell the developers to do X thing with X photos and tell them out as real, eventually.