Photoshop Before Photoshop Existed...

These days, photoshop is almost part of everyday life.  Digitally based editing programs can change everything from pictures to video and can alter almost anything in it in every possible way.  Before photoshop, doing such editing was strenuous mixtures of exposures and lots of trial and error.  Here are some of the most unbelievable images that you won't believe aren't real!

General Ulysses S. Grant:

Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in front of his troops at City Point, Va., during the Civil War. 

Researchers at the Library of Congress say it isn't real, instead it is a composite of three separate prints. The head is a photo of Grant, the horse and body from a photo of Alexander M. McCook and the background is a photo of Confederate prisoners captured at the battle of Fisher’s Hill, Va.

Abraham Lincoln:

This nearly iconic portrait (in the form of a lithograph) of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln is a composite of Lincoln’s head and the Southern politician John Calhoun’s body.

Generals:

In this photo by Mathew Brady, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman poses with his generals. Gen. Francis P. Blair, far right, was added later. The image on the left is from the same sitting, which Blair did not attend.

Cottingley Fairies:

Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, two young cousins, took a photos that appeared to be of fairies. The public, including Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle, loved them. It was decades before the two admitted the images were photos of cardboard cutouts of drawings, and they continued to maintain they had actually seen fairies.

Herbert Hoover & Charles Curtis

This famous campaign photograph showing Herbert Hoover with his hand on the shoulder of his running mate, Charles Curtis, was manipulated. One of Hoover's press directors, Edward Anthony, explained in his autobiography, that two separate pictures were used and the hand was painted in by an artist.

Stalin:

Stalin routinely had his enemies air-brushed out of photographs. In this image, a commissar was removed from the original after falling out of favor with Stalin.

Hitler:

The doctored photo is on the left, and the original is on the right. Adolf Hitler had Joseph Goebbels (second from the right) removed from the original image.


Originally spotted at: http://www.fourandsix.com/photo-tampering-history/