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Retouched Negative: When some prints of Adam-Salomon's were shown at the Edinburgh Photographic Society, an argument broke out: was the effect due to retouching? It was settled only by a microscopic examination of the prints: Adam-Salomon had indeed retouched them.
Retouching had become controversial ever since Franz Hanfstaengl, the leading portrait photographer of Germany, showed at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris a retouched negative with a print made from it before and after retouching.
At gross overexposure a negative will reverse to a positive. Direct exposure to the sun will often produce a transparent disc in the negative, which will appear in the print as menacingly black. Hence this reversal of tones is known as solarization. Because of this phenomenon the skies in wet-plate landscape negatives were not uniformly black, but had patches of low density that gave a mottled appearance to the print. Consequently they were generally retouched around the contours with opaque paint and the remaining sky area was protected with a paper mask.
One obviously excellent use for Flexichrome is in the production of expensive color portraits. The Flexichrome process has the advantage that it permits the photographer to make a number of black and white exposures in the ordinary manner and at the ordinary film cost, then have the selected negative carefully retouched before the print is made, resulting in a much more flattering picture than a straight portrait shot on regular color transparency film. Ordinarily, color retouching by any of the other processes can be done only by an expert and at great cost. |
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