Comments by "Michael Wright" (@michaelwright2986) on "Exposing Victorian Influencers Who 'Facetuned' Their Photos. (Photo Manipulation was EVERYWHERE 🤯)" video.

It looks more like they cut out paper pictures and stuck them up, and then photographed the prepared scene in a straight way. A local professional photographer testified that the imaged hadn't been subjected to photographic manipulation, and they probably hadn't. When I saw the images, I was astonished that anyone could have been fooled by them, but Conan Doyle was deep into spiritualism, and evidently needed to believe. Like believing in aliens, really.
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@chaosPneumatic I think the knowledge of retouching was quite wide-spread. 'Unretouched' is an old expression that means the same as 'no filter'. But you might know or suspect that people didn't look like that, and still be influenced. BTW, it was pretty much all for commercial purposes--the government wasn't using glammed-up photos of Victoria for political purposes.
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@GoGoSachiko When he was young, he seems to have been physically attractive, and he was highly educated, as well as King of England. He didn't age well, though.
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@cynicismpiee He really could not have had anyone executed for not marrying him, especially the royal foreign women. Anne Boleyn is supposed to have held out on him and wouldn't have sex with him before they were married (though her sister hadn't bothered about that).
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One of the things with early portraits is that they were often made with lenses with very shallow depth of field, so that blurs the details except in a narrow plane. And there was, you know, make up--though that was more for professional image-wielders and the movies. But mostly, being a photographic retoucher was one of those common jobs that has disappeared, like being a musician playing in the orchestra in a cinema in the days before the talkies.
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@ИмяФамилия-ф2д8ш In this case, I don't really think it's excusable. Have you seen the pictures? The fairies really are obvious paper cut-outs, just stuck up on sticks in front of the girls. And in the late 19th and early 20th centuries people were well aware of photo manipulation. A lot of the first 'art photographs' were elaborate composite prints composed from many negatives: the most famous one is Oscar Reijlander's 'Two Ways of Life', which is reproduced in the Wikipedia article on Reijlander. And then there was all the retouching, as a matter of course.
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@GoodPersonTestWebsite Overexposure was more a trick of 1960s fashion photography--all those harsh, grainy photographs of skinny models in mini-dresses and no skin texture whatever.
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