Pre Introduction: I realised that after promising to post this, I never did – I also checked my rating on google, and my blog post about this essay is rated highly when searching for “photo manipulation essay” So I thought I better put this up.

Introduction
Photo manipulation often goes unnoticed today. The ability to create and digitally alter an image has become an invaluable tool to the media, photographers and digital artists around the world. It allows the photographer access to tools that can be used on digital images, as counterparts for techniques in the darkroom.

The darkroom allowed photographers to create compositions of multiple negatives, by cutting them up. Another technique was to use ink or paint to draw in the missing elements, or remove the parts of the photo that was unneeded. One of the earliest recorded photo manipulations was by Matthew Brady. The image created was a composition of Abraham Lincoln’s head, with the body of a lesser politician, John Calhoun’s body in 1860. A few years after another of his images was edited to add a missing officer to a photo of all of General Sherman’s officers.
As time passed and digital photography gradually replaced traditional photography as the main media, new tools had to be developed to allow the same kind of techniques for photographers as those found in the darkroom.
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