Old School 'Photoshop' Techniques That Still Apply: Touching Up Celluloid Stills Circa 1946

Just as digital acquisition hasn’t rendered the light meter obsolete, nor NLE software altered what makes a well-paced scene — digital retouching plays by a lot of the same rules now as it always has. Recently, CreativePro dug up the fantastic-looking book Short Cuts to Photo Retouching, written by photographer Raymond Wardell in 1946. Wardell walks the reader through many techniques that will be familiar to Photoshop users — except he’s quite literally making his artistic alterations onto actual, physical film prints. Despite (or because of) this, the results are downright impressive — especially given the lack of a real-life ‘undo’ command. Click through to check out a few scans from this old gem, from which we can still learn plenty. (more…)