THINK IMAGE MANIPULATION today and Adobe’s Photoshop software may spring to mind. In fact, so embedded in popular culture is this program that ‘photoshopping’ has even entered the lexicon. Image manipulation has been normalized to the extent that photoshop is more of a term to describe this technology than the application itself. But how did we get here? Adobe’s giant plays a massive role in this whole industry, but it wasn’t the start. Before getting familiar with where image manipulation came from, we need to understand what it truly means.

In short, image manipulation is the art of transforming an image to get a specific and desired look. Of course, it’s not quite as simple as it sounds and there are plenty of implications to it. Since the creation of the first camera, photo editing has naturally developed alongside it.

It’s interesting to note that image editing actually came before digital cameras themselves, way before in fact. Let’s scroll all the way back to the 19th century and a Frenchman named Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, who in 1826, shocked everyone with the world’s first photograph. Today’s technology is evolving at such an alarming rate that we become immune to its effects, but imagine way back in 1826, what it meant to take a view and freeze it in time.

The start of photography emerged with the creation of the ‘camera obscura’ and this helped create the first photograph. Camera obscura is Latin for ‘dark room’ and surprisingly enough, it involved a dark room or box with a small lens or hole on one side, through which an image is projected onto a wall or surface. Using camera obscura on a photographic plate of pewter (malleable metal alloy), Joseph Nicéphore Niépce created an image of a view outside of his studio window. On the plate was a light-sensitive compound created by Niépce, and the image took eight hours in direct sunlight to develop.