Jackie Robinson Photo

[5smokey]

Joey - the blueish tinting you see is actually retouching "paint" applied with an airbrush.

Before computers and Photoshop, lots of photo enhancement/retouching was done by hand with an airbrush. It was quite a difficult technique to master and people could make living as a retoucher of photos. Not all retouching was done with airbrush; it could also be done with brushes and paints and even colored pencil.

In the case of black & white photography, the retoucher's goal was usually to add contrast or highlights so that when the photo was screened into a halftone (dots) and reproduced in newsprint or magazine, the image would not look as flat or muddy...edges and highlights would show up more distinctly. For a photo reproduced in one color (black ink), the camera used to make a halftone of your image would "see" the blueish paint as gray (in the same way that he blueish paint would show up as gray if you made a photocopy of your photo print).

I've worked in advertising/commercial art for nearly 35 years and for maybe the first 20 of those years, retouching was all done by hand by craftsmen. Today, all of this work is done in a computer. And when the artist makes a mistake, all he has to is hit "undo." In the old days, the retoucher would probably try to paint over the mistake and try again...or in the worst case, start over with a new photo print.