Assignment 1 - Photo Manipulation

In this article I will first give a brief review of the two historical photographic processes available in the 19-century - the Daguerreotype and the Calotype. I will then discuss each photographic process individually and edit a digital photograph to replicate the photographic process’s outcome of each process using Adobe Photoshop CS5.

Photography was invented in the 19 century. The first public available photographic process was Daguerreotype, a process invented by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in France, released in 1839. The Daguerreotype process was later challenged by William Henry Fox Talbot’s Calotype process, a negative-process photographic process patented in 1841. The Calotype process allowed the production of an unlimited number of prints from a single negative.

Daguerreotype is a photographic process with the image made on a light sensitive silver-coated metallic plate. The image capturing process was slow and it required a long exposure times ranging from three to fifteen minutes. Daguerreotype plate typically came in six different sizes. The largest plate is 8.5 inches by 6.5 inches and the smallest plate is 1.625 inches by 1.375 inches.

To replicate the photograph developed by the Daguerreotype process, I first picked a photograph took by using long exposure, a photograph that has a lot of motion blurs as you can see below.

The next step is to turn the color image to a black and white image. I then applied a metal texture with scratched surface to the image.  I am doing this is because when shooting a real Daguerreotype, the image will be shot onto a silver surface which mostly likely have scratches occurred over the years.

Most of the daguerreotype photos have a sepia tone to them. Therefore I applied a warm color filter to the image to resemble the daguerreotype feel.

While developing a daguerreotype photo, the chemicals would contact the plate’s edges and stained them. I applied spots of light orange and light blue colors to the image’s edges to simulate the stained results.

Old camera tends to produce photos with light vignette. In order to recreate the vignette, the Lens correction filter found on Photoshop CS5 was applied to the image. The last step was to crop the image to match the actual daguerreotype plate’s size.  I used the largest plate dimension as the reference and then scaled the image to make it fit on the webpage.  Below is the final version of the modified image along with the original image.

Calotype is a negative-process photographic process which allowed the production of an unlimited of prints from a single negative. In this process a silver chloride coated paper was exposed to light in a camera obscura. The areas on the paper that were exposed to light became darken. The end result is a negative image. To develop positive print from the negative, a piece of sensitized salted paper was placed underneath the negative. They were then laid flat in a frame and exposed to sunlight until a positive image formed. Warm tones, blurred image and faded over time are the typical characteristic of the calotype.

In the following paragraphs, I am going to explain what I did to turn a color digital image to a Calotype using Photoshop CS5.

I started the Calotype replication process by using a color photograph that I took.  I imported it to Photoshop and applied the Black with White adjustment layer. I increased the yellow tone and tinted the image to yield a typical calotype’s warm tone.

To archive the vintage fade effect, I applied the Hue and Saturation adjustment layer and increased the lightness.

Blur filter was applied to the image’s centre to simulate the lens old lens blur that we normally seen in the vintage photographs.

To create the negative, Invert adjustment layer was applied to the final image.