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The more one knows about how these things work the better.
Before there was Photoshop

https://youtu.be/_2mQsUIc97E
I am far from saying that a photograph must be an actual, literal and absolute fact...but it must represent truth. - Henry Peach Robinson

In this research project I aim to look into the manipulation of photos from the time periods before and after the invention and widespread implementation of Adobe Photoshop (the most prominent tool for photo manipulation). I will also be looking to see if there have been any changes in how we view beauty in the human body, the natural landscape, the food we eat and the art we admire.

So, what is photo manipulation? The term itself covers a spectrum of techniques that have changed over time, but the two techniques people are most familiar with are retouching and airbrushing. The two could be used interchangeably although the latter actually refers to the older method of using a physical airbrush on photographs. The Cambridge Dictionary (2013) defines the two as to make small changes to a picture, photograph, etc., especially in order to improve it, and to represent something as being different from how it really is. It's interesting that the former includes in it's definition; especially in order to improve it, but this definition is engrained in all of us, we expect that airbrushing is essential to improving every image we see.

Images of the world, and the objects and people contained in it, have been a key source of beauty for as long as there have been images to see, we instinctively capture or create what we think is beautiful, be it aesthetically to the eye or provokingly to the mind. The rise of photo manipulation is at the very least changing this source of beautiful images we see all around us, but are these changes for the better or for the worse?

There is no doubt that photo manipulation is currently a big part of photography, art and advertising today, sometimes it will only be used to correct light levels, however images can be, and often are, corrected so that the resulting image is completely unrecognisable from the original. Manipulating photos is such a common practice today that we think of it as being implicitly connected to current technology, and we often fondly think of the pre-Photoshop era as a time when photographs were irrefutable replicas of the scenes that they captured. However, it seems that the temperament for manipulation to achieve perfect beauty predates that of Photoshop, as I discovered that photographers and artists as early as 1846 found plenty of ways to manipulate their images to get the effects that they desired. Nevertheless, photo manipulations origins are in fact strangely rooted in a more innocent desire to create a more realistic and therefore more beautiful image.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/14314433...-of-Beauty