Photography

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A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.

This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.

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How were professional photos edited in the 70s-80s (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by paint3dbird@alien.top to c/photography@viewfinder.pro

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was looking at some old photos of Kate bush, Stevie Nicks, and some other celebrities photoshoots from that time period and admiring the glowy affect or the purple and red colour palette on the photos wondering how I can achieve that same effect and then I realized that they did not have online editing software or even internet but the photos still look very nice and not like raw images I usually see. This may be a dumb question, I am not a photographer and do not know much about all this stuff but I am just curious.

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[–] RedHuey@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

One more thing that NOBODY ever mentions: photographers in the 70s were not absolutely obsessed with absolute sharpness and stop-motion. Film just doesn’t allow that really. A lot of the great photos had plenty of flaws by modern standards. Most of the editing in a darkroom was just to get a very good print with good contrast and the intended details. Cropping was common. As was dodging and burning. Further re-touching was done, of course, but it was mostly confined to certain kinds of photographers. Depending on how your pictures were to be used, a lot of further processing was pointless.

We just didn’t think about photos as people do now.