Photo Fixing Through The Ages | Practical Photoshop

Photo manipulation isn’t a new phenomenon, as Four and Six, a website which has gathered together examples of doctored photos stretching as far back as the 19^th century proves.It’s often assumed that photo retouching is a new invention, owing itself almost entirely to Photoshop. But, photographers have been altering photos since the process was invented in the 19^th century.

Sure, it wasn’t as easily accessible back then as it is now, and often even the simplest of jobs took hours to complete. Never the less, there’s several examples of historical photos with evidence of photo tampering.

One website that’s done a stellar job of collecting several together is Four and Six, which displays famous photos from as far back as 1860 which have evidence of tampering.

The first shows an iconic picture of US President Abraham Lincoln, which apparently is a composite of Lincoln’s head and the Southern politician John Calhoun’s body. See – it’s not just modern day public figures that are obsessed with appearances.

Other examples show a photo of Adolf Hitler in which Joseph Goebbels has been removed, a photo of Oprah Winfrey in the late 80s with someone else’s body and other historical figures and celebrities.

The archive goes right up to the present day and even includes the recent photo of Julia Roberts that was banned by OFCOM for misleading the public.

Check out the Four and Six website and you might just be surprised with what you find.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Web links. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.