Why does it seem as though people's faces in old, black and white photos never have any blemishes whatsoever?

Question

No pimples, no pimple scars, no nothing! Just clear skin...

Answer 1

maybe because they didn't have any. i think that their diet had a lot to do with it. they ate lots of fruit/veggies with no preservatives, steroids, or most of the other stuff in our food today. they also used lye soap, which i've heard is actually rather good for your skin.

also notice that they weren't fat either. Not that there is anything wrong with it....just their diet was very different compared to ours today. More people should have their own vegetable gardens.

Answer 2

People used to be perfect back in the old days. Ask your Grandma.

Assuming you're talking about old glamour shots... {Hurrell { http://georgehurrellestate.com/george_hurrell_biography.htm }, etc} Read some of the write-ups about how those photos were taken ... Look at the way they were lighted, posed and shot. They're made by extremely experienced photographers that put everything they had into getting them perfect... everything from 8x10 film and high end spotlights to some fancy manipulations in the darkroom.

The subjects made a career of being perfect in the first place and probably wouldn't have come within a mile of the studio with a pimple on their chin. {Though, if you look closely, some of the men weren't all that careful.}

{Airbrushes have been around for some time as well.}

If you're talking about normal people in black and white photos... you must have missed a few.

Answer 3

Manual retouching is a lost art that was practiced by almost all pro photographers in the first half of the century.

A skilled retoucher could get rid of blemishes just as easily as a modern photoshop whiz could.

By the way, the previous response about the red sensitivity of film is completely incorrect. Up until the early 1940s, it wasn't common for film to have any red sensitivity at all. Silver halides don't have any inherrent red sensitivity-they normally want to be blue sensitive.

In fact, panachromatic films, such as Tri-X, were a big deal for that reason.

Answer 4

Another reason that I can't believe more people aren't picking up on is the tried and true "Pantyhose over the lens" trick. The pantyhose softens the image to help make any imperfections in the skin not show up. It is transparent enough to not mess with the main form of the image, but it does a great job with smoothing out the skin.

Answer 5

For two reasons. Firstly, the women piled on the makup.

Secondly, black and white film is more sensitive to red. If you were to take a photograph of a person and then extracted the red channel with photoshop, it will look like the old black and white film did and skin will be blemish free.

Answer 6

Old film did not pick up as many details as the more "advanced" film today does, and in many cases the photos were professionally adjusted to underdevelop skin conditions so they could not be seen. Photography was not as widely available to everyone as it is today, so when a picture was made, it was more likely to have been done by such a professional.

Also, as another person said, black and white film didn't pick up the redness or darker blotches caused by blemishes. . .skin was more likely to look as if it was all one shade because the variation in tone isn't as great as it would have been in color.

Answer 7

If you think about it, back then they grew their own food and did not have all the processed and greasy fried foods we do today that affect our skin. Im sure there were many people with skin conditions but not as bad as today. Who knows? Maybe if they did have blemishes they did not have their picture taken.