I’ve been using Photoshop since version 3, back around 1995. In the early days, it was merely a background skill, something I learned to do minor cleanup on really messed up images, or to do design and layout on images I was putting into documents I was working on.

A few years ago, I took an intense, two-day Photoshop workshop at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. That workshop changed my life. Taught by Photoshop gurus Deke McClelland, Michael Ninness, it started me on the path of viewing Photoshop as an indispensible part of the digital image workflow: Photoshop is not a tool to fix images; rather, it is the digital darkroom itself, where EVERY image can be adjusted and tweaked. Not using Photoshop is the digital equivalent of shooting only Polaroids. Not many professional photographers would attempt a workflow like that!

I realized recently that many of my clients were not aware of my retouching skills, and this blog post is the first step in remedying that. Additionally, I’ve posted a gallery of retouched images to my portfolio. Click here to see it.

The images above are an example of some of my advanced retouching. They show a simulation of an 18th century style “ambrotype” print. The ambrotype is a “wet plate collodion” type process in which a glass rectangle (typically 4” x 5”) is coated with a wet emulsion. While the plate is still wet, it is put into a holder, inserted into the camera, and exposed. The photographer then takes the plate into a darkroom and processes it in chemicals to develop the image.

This is the classic image process used by Civil War era photographers.

Traditional ambrotype photography uses dangerous chemicals, such as potassium cyanide and ether. I wanted to reproduce the wet plate effect using the somewhat safer technique of Photoshop.

On the top is a straight- out-of-camera image.

Below that is the final ambrotype simulation. This effect involved 14 individual layers in Photoshop: Afer converting the image to black and white, I created noise and rendered fibers on layers that were then blended with the monochrome image to create the lines and blobs common to wet plate images. I manipulated the levels and curves to get the unusual contrast profile of a wet plate image, then added flaws to the border to emulate the scuffing typical of handling wet emulsion.