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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The Hasselblad/Zeiss Softar filters where interesting and useful. they were well produced glass filters that had an array of dimples on the surface that would bend light over the dimple but the non-dimpled areas remained unchanged. The result was a soft glow around an otherwise sharp image. There were 3 levels, I still have a Softar 1. never wanted the 2 or 3.
There were/are also black dot and black mesh filters that can soften without losing as much contrast.
As a side note the things photoshop did, especially in the beginning, were based on techniques for editing in the dark room. And things like dodging and burning have retained that connection to the analogue process.
Even 100 years ago composite (adding photos together to create a different scene) photos were being created in the darkroom.
The chemicals in the darkroom were very bad for the health of photographers though. Digital makes it a much better and healthier profession.
read Ansel Adams books on the dark room and the negative if you’re really interested. In simplest terms you would use an enlarger that would flip the negative into a positive and increase the print’s size from say 36mmx24mm film to 8x10 print. The process is no different than taking an actual photo, but you’re inside the camera now. You shine light through the negative onto a piece of paper that is light sensitive similar to film. The techniques to make an area darker or lighter are simple. Each ‘print’ might be exposed for say 30 seconds, the more ‘exposed’, the stronger the print. By controlling how much area is exposed to how much light, you can “dodge and burn”. It may be as simple as putting a piece of cardstock over the paper for 5 seconds to reduce the ‘exposure’ in that area for 5 seconds less than the rest of the photo. Once exposure is complete, you move the print through the developing process and in this case you can ‘see’ the print develop. How long you leave it in the developer will also affect the outcome, but in this case you may have a soft red or brown light to help/enable you to see what’s happening. It’s quite an experience to watch it come together.
All the answers I see here are why I snicker every time someone claims that digital editing is ‘a lie’ or is ‘cheating,’ and that film is more ‘true’ or ‘honest.’
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.
Search how dodge and burn got their names. It’ll blow your mind.😁
Have dodged and burn. Not a professional printer so it was difficult process to repeat.
Ansel Adams used a lot of this process to produce the 11 tones of the Zone System. While Mr. Adams tried to get his exposures in the Zone by carefully metering a scene, he also made use of professional printers who would make his prints off of annotated contact sheets.
When I shot B&W film, I had a yellow and red filter ready. I preferred the contrast the red filter gave me.
I have not touched up a shot with paint or pencil, but I did, for several years, do hand tinting/coloring my own work using oil-based pencils and oil paint.
This really worked better with fiber based paper and as that go more and more difficult/expensive to find, I gave it up.
I have printed monochrome shots onto water-color paper and produced pleasing effects.
A lot of the stuff that was put on programs like Photoshop & Lightroom was to mimic stuff that was initially done in the darkroom.
Check out Scott Mutter’s work. Pre-Adobe Photoshop. All done in a darkroom.
So this is the process for black and white pictures. It’s similar for color pictures, but it involves more colors and is more difficult.
Your camera has an aperature (a small opening) for the light from the lense to hit your film. You might have heard of a camera obscura, that’s how the camera gets the picture into the camera. Inside the camera, you have your film. This film is photosensitive, the image that gets through the aperature (for a specific amount of time) is burnt into the film, kinda like a sun burn on skin: The areas exposed to more light (brighter part of your subject) get burnt more, the darker areas (exposed to less light) not as much.
The aperature and shutter speed determine how much light hits your film, and the best value depend on your film. (See ISO numbers).
Then you go into a darkroom, a room completely sealed off from light, except for a red lamp, which does not affect the film. There, you can open the film, and cure it. By curing the film (I’m not sure that’s the right word, but I hope you get the idea), it stops changing with exposure to more light. In practice, you dunk your film in a chemical bath for a certain amount of time, at a certain temperature and all that.
Once your film is cured, the film is your negative. Bright and dark are flipped. A white wall appears black, a chocolate donut appears white. Now you wash your negative to get rid of the chemicals you just used, and dry your film.
Once your film is developed and dry, you take it to the light machine (still in the dark room). A light machine looks a little bit like a microscope, but instead of light shining from underneath, it shines from above, through your negative, and hits photo paper. This is where what you understand as photo editing happens, for the most part.
The light machine is like a projector. The light shines through the film and onto your photo paper. Here, again, you deal with exposure, the amount of light you expose your photo to, and again this reverses the black/white “colors”. More light from the light machine, and your photo paper becomes over exposed (too dark). Too little light, and its under exposed (too bright).
While developing your picture, you can compensate somewhat for defects you found in your film, but the film is ultimately where your image comes from, so it makes sense to kinda know what settings lead to what effects. You can also shrink or increase your picture, since the light machine works like a projector. The closer the light machine’s film is to the photo paper, the smaller the photo, the farther away the picture is from the film, the bigger the picture. You can also blur the edges, expose only parts of the film, or double expose your film (for example by using half the light from the light machine and using two negatives for one photo).
Then you douse the photo paper in a chemical bath, rinse it, and dry it.
Going through this a couple hundred or thousand times, you get good at building up an intuition for what picture to take, with an idea of what you’re gonna do in the light room.
Photography is an awesome activity. Developing pictures was my favorite thing to do in High School, and I encourage you to take a college class in B/W photography, it’s a lot of fun, you’ll learn about optics, and how to compose and process your shots, and in the end you end up with cool pictures you can gift for Christmas. You might even get to go on cool field trips.
In addition to those options also mentioned here, there was excellent hair and makeup designed for still photography, finely tuned lighting from years of craft, and diffusion filters on the camera lens (of many varieties) to make the skin glow. Then in the b&w darkroom, more diffusion filters under the lens to make the darks glow, selective use of poly contrast filters, and print retouching. Color went out to the retoucher, too, and could be dyed. So, lots of things.
For the person themselves, the glowy skin is mainly down to ‘painting the image’ AKA retouching. You can see versions of this in B&W photos hand coloured: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand-colouring_of_photographs
I did a headshot for a modelling friend hoping to get back into the business in the mid 80’s. Another mutual friend’s dad (an award winning commercial photographer/printer) did the print & retouching. It was almost as if the print had been painted when you looked at it close up, but from three feet away the model was flawless, not a hair out of place & no skin blemishes.
I’ve colorized black and white photos with oil paint. Only on matte finish. If they were glossy I would spray them with matte finish first and then paint them.
Outside of the darkoom there were a lot of in camera techniques that could get what you are describing. Colored gels over flash heads, colored lens filters, colored reflectors, and intentionally using films with different white balance were some of the techniques used prior digital photos/editing.
Here is a great example of playing with colors by using a colored lens filter and colored gels on a flash. Resulting in a beautiful purple sky because of the lens filter but with natural skin tones because of the gel on the flash.
The details are in Joe McNally’s the Moment it Click’s book which I picked up years ago. A lot of photos in his book he talks about how he accomplished them and most were shot on film.
