Of course it does! We have The GIMP and Photoshop! Well…

Back in the day, when everybody shot film, things were a bit more difficult. For a lot of operations it was pretty easy: select the right film, right exposure. For control you could vary how you developed it and beyond that, you could do a million things in the darkroom when printing. However, if you wanted to do something like combine 2 images or take out part of an image or smooth a skin tone, you were in for a lot more fun.

Retouching was done by changing the negative. If you wanted to remove that pimple from a portrait? Go get some paint and pant over it. This was tricky, as for 35mm film, this was very small and fiddly.

This is why publications such as Playboy shot on larger format film. From what I’ve read, either 120 (“medium format” to you and I – bigger than 35mm, but still not huge) or 4×5 (inches – much bigger) or even 8×10. While we can all wish that we too could get hold of some 8×10 Kodachrome to play with (and presumably a lab to process it for us) – those days are long gone.

With a negative of 8×10 inches, you have a lot more to play with and it’s much easier. For one thing, a contact print is as big as most enlargements people do from 35mm!

With humans essentially painting on negatives, it became relatively easy to spot when things had been manipulated (meaning there were experts who did it). However, with the increased sophistication of digital tools, creating quite realistic (even to expert eye) manipulations wasn’t that hard.

Recently, Canon (among others) has tried to bring technology to digital that would enable you to check that the image has not been manipulated after it came out of the camera.

This technology is, of course, flawed.

From the guy who enabled blind people to read eBooks comes the breaking of this system (Boing Bong and Network World).

“Pics or it didn’t happen” just is completely not true.