There is/was a wonderful show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC recently - Robert Frank's The Americans from 1958. Wonderful B&W's. There were plenty of finished prints but also some proof sheets and initial prints. You could really see how much "post processing" went on in the dark room.
There are certainly things we can do in PS or other programs to completely change pictures - putting someone in another setting, having people flying in the air around a room, etc - but the basic "fixes" really aren't much different than what was done in the darkroom.
In fact, there was one photo at, I think, a state fair or something and in the foreground was a flag - it was pretty transparent and the scene at the fair was visible through it. These days, someone would have said, "photoshoped". But it wasn't.
|