تنقیح طبعات الأسود والأبيض retouch .. مجلة فن التصوير اللبنانية _ ع١٣

RETOUCH Revised black and white editions

In a first stop at “the frills,” we review the method of retouching photographs after printing them, noting that the best and most effective process is. Frills » Negatives .. But it is a complex process and needs more experience. Therefore, we start here with a method that is easy for amateurs to master, with a little attention and then practice, to reach a broader understanding of this important stage of photography.

Together, over the course of the previous episodes, we reviewed the processes of developing, printing, and laboratory techniques for black and white.

Before starting, we stop here on what we emphasized in previous episodes, which is the necessity of adopting absolute cleanliness with regard to the negatives, as we recommended keeping them in special envelopes for them, given the ability of these negatives to capture volatile spare parts, as we emphasized

Not to carry the negative from its center by hand, lest we cause scratches on its surface, so we need to hold the film from its side.

Whatever precautions we take, our prints remain exposed to small clouds of dust, which sometimes turn into large white dots on the print, according to our required enlargements of the image.
Faced with the inability to reprint without defects, the only available solution is to perform this revision
Defects and cover them or make. Frills, for her, relying on special simple equipment that is now available and accessible to everyone. This equipment is limited to a box that contains a fine-headed brush with discs of Chinese ink or watercolors ranging from black to light to gray to white. This apart from a special blade is like an eraser. .

As we mentioned in the introduction, this equipment is for retouching printed photos, not negatives. The latter has its own equipment and style, and it is currently limited to professionals who work in studios specialized in identity photos, passports, and the like.
It is known that black and white prints are a series of gradations of these two colors, hence the importance of taking into account mixing the available colors in the special box and conducting tests on the site that we want to retouch before starting the retouching process to reach a color that matches the area surrounding the point that we want to cover.

It is natural to use water with the discs in the box, where we take the brush and wet it, then pass it on a piece of cotton - in a spiral motion - to absorb the excess of water before passing it on the desired and appropriate disc in terms of color. If we want to reduce the intensity of the color, we must pass the brush on a piece of paper Or on a shroud and in a spiral manner as well, in order to keep the feather's hairs together and the head straight, and to avoid their separation and multiplicity of heads. After that, we pass the tip of the feather over the white point smoothly and in the manner of pin-pricking, or dotting, and we continue to do so until the entire spot is covered and its color matches the color of its surroundings completely.

This is for the white points that we want to cover, but it may happen sometimes that there are black spots caused by scratches on the negative. And here comes the role of the special code that comes with the box, as we mentioned. And we start the process of erasing the black spot accurately and smoothly as well, and in one direction from right to left or vice versa, in order to avoid tearing or wounding this part of the image. In this sense, we will work in a later issue to provide the reader with a broader study on the arts of frills - in general -

Prepared by: Zaven Vartan