HISTORY40 - Photography

This article is about the history of photography.  For my purposes, photography is the process of creating durable images by recording light, either chemically, by means of a light-sensitive material, such as photographic film, or electronically, by means of an image sensor.  The word “photography” was created from the Greek roots of two words that combined mean “drawing with light.”

Note:  Photography has been an important part of Ring-family life for 116 years.  In 1905, my Grandfather Ambrose Ring began taking photos of his mining exploits in southern Arizona.  In the 1990s, my brother Al Ring and I (re)discovered these old prints, started exploring where the images were taken, and began research about the mining history of the region.  Our research culminated in the publication of the book, “Ruby Arizona - Mining, Mayhem, and Murder,” in 2005.  This history of a borderland mining ghost town, set us off on a (retirement) career of Arizona historical research and writings that included newspaper columns, additional books, and a dedicated website (ringbrothershistory.com).  Pat and I continue the Ring-family photography tradition today by recording family events and exploring creativity in making interesting pictures.

The history of photography began in remote antiquity with the discovery of two critical principles: pin-hole image projection and the observation that some substances are visibly altered by exposure to light.  The birth of photography was then concerned with inventing means to capture and retain images - an invention that did not occur until the 1820s.

This article will cover photography’s enabling principles, the quest for permanent images, early camera improvements, popularization of photography, instant photos, influence of WWII photography, advanced image control and smart cameras, digital photography, and the future of photography.

The Phenomenon of Camera Obscura

A natural phenomenon, known as camera obscura, or pinhole image, can project an image through a small opening in one surface onto an opposite surface.  This principle may have been known in prehistoric times, but the earliest known written record of the camera obscura effect is to be found in Chinese writings dated to the 5^th century BC.  For the next 1,500 years or so, various scientists observed the camera obscura effect and conducted experiments to better understand the behavior of light.  The first person to suggest that an image from one side of a hole in a surface could be projected onto a screen on the other side of the surface, and prove the concept, was Iraqi scientist Ibn al-Haytham, in his Book of Optics in 1021.  Ibn al-Haytham, known as the “father of modern optics,” is credited with the invention of the camera obscura.

The camera obscura (Latin for “dark chamber) consists of a dark room, tent, box, etc., with a small hole in one of the walls (or the ceiling). The light passing through the small hole will project an image of the scene outside the chamber onto a surface in the chamber opposite to the hole.  Since light moves in a straight line (first law of geometric optics) through the hole, the projected image will appear to be flipped (upside-down) and reversed (left-to-right), but with color and perspective preserved.  

The figure below illustrates the camera obscura effect.

 

This diagram illustrates the phenomenon of camera obscura.

The light from the top of the candle travels down through the hole to the bottom of the wall opposite. Similarly, the light from the bottom of the candle appears projected at the top of the wall inside the box, making the image appear upside down.  Similarly, the image is also inverted, or reversed, left-to-right.

Camera obscuras were used in 13^th century for safe observation of solar eclipses, without having to look directly at the sun.  At the same time, the effect was used as a projector for entertainment.  Artists started using camera obscuras in 15^th century.

Artist using a room-size camera obscura.

 

In the 17^th century, portable versions of the camera obscura were developed and commonly used - first as a tent, later as boxes.  In 1685, the first portable box camera obscura that was small enough for practical use was built by German author Johann Zahn.  Basic lenses to focus the light and provide a larger aperture, compared to the pinhole, were also introduced around this time.

The box-type camera obscura often had a 45-degree angled mirror projecting an upright image onto tracing paper placed on the box’s glass top, restoring the scene’s original up-down, right-left projection.  Artists discovered this phenomenon and used it to help them create (tracing, drawing, and painting) realistic images of the outside world on a two-dimensional surface.

 

A camera obscura box with an internal mirror, projecting an upright image at the top.

Note:  The human eye (and those of animals such as birds, fish, reptiles, etc.) works much like a camera obscura, with a small opening (pupil), a convex lens, and a surface where the image is formed (retina). The human brain provides the geometric translation to preserve the original scene’s up-down, right-left arrangement.

The camera obscura concept was developed further into the photographic camera in the first half of the 19th century, when camera obscura boxes were used to expose light-sensitive materials to the projected image.

Light Sensitive Materials

The notion that light can affect various substances - for instance, the sun tanning of skin or fading of textiles - has been around since very early times, but it was not until the late Middle Ages that light sensitive material critical to photography would be discovered.

German Friar Albertus Magnus discovered silver nitrate in the 13^th century, while German poet, historian, and archaeologist Georg Fabricius discovered silver chloride in the 16^th century.  These chemicals were observed to be sensitive to light (becoming black on exposure to light), but were not applied to photography for many years, despite early knowledge of the camera obscura.

In 1777, Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele was studying the more intrinsically light-sensitive silver chloride and determined that light darkened it by disintegrating it into microscopic dark particles of metallic silver.  Of greater potential usefulness, Scheele found that ammonia dissolved the silver chloride, but not the dark particles. This discovery could have been used to stabilize or "fix" a camera image captured with silver chloride, but was not picked up by the earliest photography experimenters.  Scheele also noted that red light did not have much effect on silver chloride, a phenomenon that would later be applied in photographic darkrooms as a method of seeing black-and-white prints without harming their development.

First Permanent Images

Around the year 1800, British inventor Thomas Wedgwood made the first known attempt to capture an image in a camera obscura by means of a light-sensitive substance.  He used paper or white leather treated with silver nitrate.  His experiments yielded only faint images that were not light-fast, but his conceptual breakthrough and partial success have led some historians to call him "the first photographer.”

In 1816, French inventor Nicephore Niépce began experiments trying to produces permanent images with a camera obscura.  His initial efforts with silver chloride failed, so he turned his attention to light-sensitive organic substances.

The oldest surviving photograph of an image formed in a camera was created by Niépce in 1826 or 1827. It was made on a polished sheet of pewter, and the light-sensitive substance was a thin coating of bitumen, a naturally occurring petroleum tar, which was dissolved in lavender oil, applied to the surface of the pewter and allowed to dry before use. After a very long exposure in the camera (traditionally said to be eight hours, but now believed to be several days), the bitumen was sufficiently hardened in proportion to its exposure to light that the unhardened part could be removed with a solvent, leaving a positive image with the light areas represented by hardened bitumen and the dark areas by bare pewter. To see the image plainly, the plate had to be lit and viewed in such a way that the bare metal appeared dark and the bitumen relatively light.

 

The world's oldest surviving photograph, a view outside the window of French photographer Nicephore Niépce, 1826 or 1827.

In partnership, Niépce and fellow Frenchman Louis Daguerre refined the bitumen process, substituting a more sensitive resin and a very different post-exposure treatment that yielded higher-quality and more easily viewed images. Exposure times in the camera, although substantially reduced, were still measured in hours.

Daguerreotypes.  Niépce died suddenly in 1833, leaving his notes to Daguerre. More interested in silver-based processes than Niépce had been, Daguerre experimented with photographing camera images directly onto a mirror-like silver-surfaced plate that had been exposed to iodine vapor, which reacted with the silver to form a coating of silver iodide.  As with the bitumen process, the result appeared as a positive (image showing lights and shades or colors true to the original) when it was suitably lit and viewed.  Exposure times were still impractically long until Daguerre made the pivotal discovery that the non-visible image produced on such a plate by a much shorter exposure could be "developed" to full visibility by mercury fumes.  This brought the required exposure time down to a few minutes under optimum conditions.  A strong hot solution of common salt served to stabilize, or fix, the image by removing the remaining silver iodide.

View of the Boulevard du Temple, a daguerreotype made by Louis Daguerre in 1838, is generally accepted as the earliest photograph to include people. It is a view of a busy street, but because the exposure lasted for several minutes, the moving traffic left no trace. Only the two men near the bottom left corner, one of them apparently having his boots polished by the other, remained in one place long enough to be visible.

 

On January 7, 1839, this first complete practical photographic process was announced at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, and the news quickly spread.  Known as the daguerreotype process, it was the most common commercial process until the late 1850s, when it was superseded by the collodion process.

Emulsion Plates. The collodion (or wet plate) process was named after collodion, a light-sensitive syrupy emulsion solution of nitrocellulose in a mixture of alcohol and ether, that was used to coat the photographic material.  The process was less expensive than daguerreotypes and required only two or three seconds of exposure time, but required the photographic material to be coated with collodion, sensitized, exposed, and developed within the span of about fifteen minutes.  This timeline necessitated a portable darkroom for use in the field. Photographers needed to have chemistry on hand and often traveled in wagons that doubled as a darkroom.  Many photographs from the Civil War were produced on wet plates.

Collodion could also be used in dry form, at the cost of greatly increased exposure time. This made the dry form unsuitable for the usual portraiture work of most professional photographers of the 19^th century. The use of the dry form was therefore mostly confined to landscape photography and other special applications, where minutes-long exposure times were tolerable.

Dry Plates.  In the 1870s, photography took another huge leap forward. English photographer and physician Richard Maddox invented lightweight gelatin negative plates that were nearly equal to wet plates in speed and quality.

These dry plates could be produced and stored for later use, rather than made as needed during the photo-taking process. This allowed photographers much more freedom in taking photographs. The process also allowed for smaller cameras that could be hand-held.

Early Camera Improvements

In the mid-1850s, bellows were added to cameras to help with focusing by changing the distance between the aperture and the image plate.

As exposure times decreased, the first camera with a mechanical shutter was developed in the 1880s.

Popularization

The daguerreotype proved popular in response to the demand for portraiture that emerged from the middle classes during the second half of the 19^th century.  This demand, which could not be met in volume and in cost by oil painting, added to the push for the commercial development of photography.

In 1884, George Eastman, of Rochester, New York, developed dry gel on paper, or film, to replace the photographic plate so that a photographer no longer needed to carry boxes of plates and toxic chemicals around. 

The flexible roll film allowed Eastman to develop a self-contained wooden box camera that held 100 film exposures that gave circular images of 2 5/8-inch diameter. The camera had a small single lens with no focusing adjustment.  After taking a photograph, a key on top of the camera was used to wind the film onto the next frame. There was no viewfinder on the camera; instead, two V-shaped lines on the top of the camera were intended to aid aiming the camera at the subject. 

In 1888, Eastman's Kodak camera went on the market.  The original camera sold for $25, loaded with a roll of film, and included a leather carrying case.  Now anyone could take a photograph and leave the complex parts of the process to others. 

 

The first Kodak camera designed for the public hit the market in 1888.

Photography became available for the mass-market in 1901 with the introduction of the Kodak Brownie, a long-running popular series of simple and inexpensive cameras. It was a basic box camera with a simple lens that took 2 1/4-inch square pictures.  Because of its simple controls and initial price of $1 (equivalent to $31 in 2020), along with the low price of Kodak roll film and processing, the Brownie became very popular.

The consumer would take pictures and send the camera back to the factory for the film to be developed and prints made, much like modern disposable cameras.  This was the first camera inexpensive enough for the average person to afford.

Snapshot photography became a national craze.  By 1898, just ten years after the first Kodak camera was introduced, one photography journal estimated that over 1.5 million roll-film cameras had reached the hands of amateur shutterbugs.

Cameras and photography continued to evolve.  Kodak soon added optical viewfinders to their cameras.  In 1898, Kodak introduced the first pocket folding camera, and came out with an improved model in 1903 that was produced through 1915.  In 1912, Kodak introduced a small vest pocket camera.  In 1925, Leica introduced the 35 mm format to still photography.  In 1932, Kodak introduced the first 8 mm amateur motion picture film, cameras, and projectors.  In 1936, the German company IHAGEE introduced the first 35 mm Single Lens Reflex camera that permitted the photographer to view through the lens and see exactly what would be captured in the image.  The popular Kodak Brownie series continued to be improved and was manufactured until 1986.

 

My grandfather used a Kodak No. 3A Folding Pocket Camera like this one to take photos of mining activity in the western U.S.

Camera manufacturers gradually added capability for basic image control, including capability to set the camera aperture, shutter speed, and exposure time.

The first widely used method of color photography was the Autochrome plate, a process inventors and brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière began working on in the 1890s and commercially introduced in 1907.  But the process was complex and expensive.  It wasn’t until the 1930s that film was sensitive enough for hand-held snapshot-taking; color photos served a niche market of affluent advanced amateurs.

A new era in color photography began with the introduction of Kodachrome film, available for 35 mm slides in 1936.  It captured the red, green, and blue color components in three layers of emulsion.

In 1942, Kodacolor film was introduced - the first roll film for snapshots that yielded negatives for making color prints on paper.  Kodacolor was not available in 35 mm cameras until 1958.

War Photography

Around 1930, Henri-Cartier Bresson and other photographers began to use small 35 mm cameras to capture images of life as it occurred, rather than staged portraits. When World War II started in 1939, many photojournalists adopted this style.

The posed portraits of World War I soldiers gave way to graphic images of war and its aftermath. Images such as Associated Press photographer Joel Rosenthal's photo, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, brought the reality of war home and helped galvanize the American people like never before. This style of capturing decisive moments shaped the face of photography forever.

 

Joel Rosenthal's photo, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, an example of capturing decisive moments, shaped the face of photography forever.

Instant Images

The invention of commercially viable instant cameras, which were easy to use, is generally credited to American scientist Edwin Land, who unveiled the first commercial instant camera, Polaroid’s Model 95 Land Camera, in 1948.  The Model 95, used a secret chemical process to develop film inside the camera in less than a minute.

This new camera was fairly expensive, but the novelty of instant images caught the public's attention. By the mid-1960s, Polaroid had many models on the market and the price had dropped so that even more people could afford it.

In 2008, Polaroid stopped making their famous instant film, and took their secrets with them.

 

Polaroid introduced the Model 95 instant image Land Camera in 1948.

 

Advanced Image Control and Smart Cameras

While the French introduced the permanent image, the Japanese brought easier image control to the photographer.

In the 1950s, Asahi (which later became Pentax) introduced the Asahiflex camera and Nikon introduced its Nikon F camera. These were both Single Lens Reflex (SLR) cameras and the Nikon F allowed for interchangeable lenses and other accessories.

For the next 30 years, SLR-style cameras remained the camera of choice for serious photographers. Many improvements were introduced to both the cameras and the film. Image control in these cameras grew to include settings for film sensitivity, white balance, clarity, contrast, brightness, saturation, and hue.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, compact cameras that were capable of making basic image control decisions on their own were introduced. These "point-and-shoot" cameras calculated shutter speed, aperture, and focus, leaving photographers free to concentrate on composition.  Automatic cameras became immensely popular with casual photographers.

Simple, inexpensive disposable cameras were introduced in the mid-1980s and continue to be popular today.  Photographers can capture moments of most value to them, such as weddings, and mail in the camera for photo processing.

Professionals and serious amateurs continued to prefer to make their own adjustments and enjoyed the image control available with SLR cameras.

Digital Photography

Digital photography uses an electronic image sensor to record the image as a set of electronic data rather than as chemical changes on film.

The charge-coupled device (CCD) was the image-capturing component in first-generation digital cameras.   A CCD is a light sensor that sits behind the camera lens and captures the image, essentially taking the place of the film in the camera.  It was invented in 1969 by Willard Boyle and George E. Smith at AT&T Bell Labs as a memory device.  It was Dr. Michael Tompsett from Bell Labs however, who discovered that the CCD could be used as an imaging sensor.  After years of use, the CCD has increasingly been replaced by CMOS, complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology, that emerged as an alternative to CCD image sensors and eventually outsold them by the mid-2000s.   (Too complicated to explain here.)

Photography infrastructure additions helped make digital photography more efficient and easier to share.  JPEG standards were created for digital images in 1988.  Mosaic, the first web browser that let people view photographs over the web, was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1992.

Today, digital photography is used by billions of people worldwide, dramatically increasing photographic activity and material and also fueling citizen journalism.  The web has been a popular medium for storing and sharing photos ever since the first photograph was published on the web in 1992.  Since then, sites and apps such as Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Imgur, and Photobucket have been used by many millions of people to share their pictures.

Here are a few benefits of digital photography over film photography:

a.      Photo resolution, even in point-and-shoot cameras, is often 12-20 megapixels - high enough for large   prints.  Can choose images to print.  Can print any desired size - at home or at a photo lab.

b.       Can change “film” speeds between individual shots.

c.       Digital cameras are generally lighter than film cameras.

d.       Memory cards are tiny and can store many images.

e.       Images can be viewed immediately and then retaken, or adjusted, if necessary.

f.        Images can be viewed on a large-screen TV.

g.       Images can be edited right on the camera, or easily processed with photo-editing software.

h.       Many cameras offer built-in filters.

i.         No cost for film or developing.  Rechargeable battery packs are economical.

Digital photography dominates the 21^st century. More than 99% of photographs taken around the world are through digital cameras, increasingly through smartphones.

Digital Cameras.  In 1981, Sony unveiled the first consumer camera to use a CCD for imaging, eliminating the need for film: the Sony Mavica. While the Mavica saved images to disk, the images were displayed on television, and the camera was not fully digital.

The first digital camera to both record and save images in a digital format was the Fujix DS-1P created by Fujfilm in 1988.

In the 1980s and 1990s, numerous manufacturers worked on cameras that stored images electronically, starting with basic point-and-shoot cameras.  Today, even the most basic point-and-shoot digital cameras take high quality images.

By 1991, Kodak had produced the first digital camera that was advanced enough to be used successfully by professionals:  the DCS 100, the first commercially available digital Single Lens Reflex camera.  Although its high cost precluded uses other than photojournalism and professional photography, commercial digital photography was born.

 

First professional digital camera, the Kodak DCS 100, was introduced in 1991.

 

Other manufacturers quickly followed and today Canon, Nikon, Pentax, and other manufacturers offer advanced digital SLR (DSLR) cameras.

In 2008, the first mirrorless camera, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1, was released in Japan. Mirrorless cameras are the latest in professional cameras - they are basically more compact DSLRs, without the internal mirror that reflects light onto the sensor.  Mirrorless cameras are smaller and lighter than DSLRs with optical capabilities rapidly approaching DSLRs.

In the last 10 years or so, there has been a lot of development of reduced-size sensors that achieve picture quality approaching that of so-called “full frame” sensors by virtue of advanced electronic design and increased computational power.  Examples of this are the “four thirds” sensor and more recently popular “micro four thirds” sensors that greatly reduce size and weight of mirrorless cameras.

The Camera Phone.  The big digital revolution was the camera phone. The Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210, in 1999, and the Samsung SCH-V200, in 2000, were the first camera phones.  A few months later, the Sharp Electronics J-SH04 J-Phone was the first that didn't have to be plugged into a computer.  It could just send photos, making it hugely popular in Japan and Korea.  By 2003, camera phone sales overtook digital cameras.

 

One of the first camera phones, the Samsung SCH-V200, introduced in 2000.

In 2007, Apple launched the iPhone, and the smartphone age truly began. The cameras built into phones quickly improved, but a number of factors combined to transform everyone into a photographer:  phone memories got bigger so you could take more pictures; CCD sensors were replaced by CMOS chips that use less power; 3G, 4G and 5G made it possible to share photos instantly; and photography sites like Flickr soon gave way to social networks like Facebook and Instagram as a place to share shots.

Today's best camera phones routinely come with two, three or four cameras to capture even better images. Smartphones' computer power has also grown rapidly to keep up with improving lenses and image sensors.  If you shoot in “burst” mode, you can take several photos at a set interval (for example of a moving child), and later choose the best one to keep.  In addition, today’s camera phones offer good quality video.  You can even look through the video, frame by frame, and choose a frame for a still photo.  Camera phones are rapidly replacing traditional point-and-shoot camera.

Image Processing.  An important difference between digital and chemical photography is that chemical photography resists photo manipulation because it involves film and photographic paper, while digital imaging is a highly manipulative medium. This difference allows significant post-processing opportunities for digital images.

In the 1980s, photo editing computer programs for personal computers were introduced. The first version of Adobe Photoshop was released in 1987. Since then, with continual updates, it has become one of the most popular photo editing programs.  It is so popular that many people now use the word "photoshop" to mean photo editing in general.

Adobe Photoshop Elements, released in 2001, is a graphics editor for photographers, image editors, and hobbyists.  It contains most of the features of Adobe Photoshop but with fewer and simpler options. The program allows users to create, edit, organize, and share images.

In 2008, another powerful post-processing software program, Adobe Lightroom, was developed by and for photographers, to supplement the much more complex Adobe Photoshop.  In Lightroom, you can both organize your photo library and edit photos.  Using Lightroom, you can easily create image collections, keyword images, share images directly to social media, batch process, and more.

These photo-editing programs provide tools for such functions as cropping, resizing, red eye removal, teeth whitening, straightening, spot healing, erasing, and painting.  They also allow the user to make adjustments in such image characteristics as white balance for temperature and tint for correct colors, exposure, contrast, clarity, color saturation, sharpening for contrast control in light-meets-dark areas, noise reduction, lens correction, perspective correction, grain for creative effect, vignette for edge darkening or brightening, radial filter for photo oval-area selection, graduated filter for rectangular-area selection, brush tool to “brush” on changes with a mouse or pen/tablet, and HSL to fine tune color properties.

In 2011 the first photo editing mobile apps were released on the online App Store.  The first was Fotolr Photo Editor. Many, many other apps have been made for other mobile operating systems.  These apps allow easy editing and photo sharing by tablet computers and smartphones.

Future of Photography

Here are five predictions for the future of photography from expert Craig Hull in Photography News.

Smartphones Will Kill Off Compacts.  Since 2010, digital camera sales have fallen 80%.  Where digital camera systems fail, smartphones will pick up the slack.  The rise of smartphones will continue to bring many advancements:  better sensors, higher resolutions, and intuitive concepts.  These will allow people to take better pictures more easily. After all, the best camera is the one you have with you.  Smartphones already have constant connectivity, enabling the user to share images instantly.  For most people, a smartphone does everything that they need. On top of that, there are hundreds of apps to use.  Compact cameras will no longer provide anything that the smartphone can’t do better.

Death of the DSLR?  Over recent years, mirrorless cameras have improved beyond all predictions.  Every major camera manufacturer now has mirrorless systems.  The advantages of these systems over DSLRs, are they are smaller, lighter, and thus, way more portable.  On top of this, the lack of a mirror means true silent shooting, less camera shake, and a faster rate of continuous burst shooting.  DSLRs had the edge in image quality, but that gap has now closed.  The Sony A7 RIII mirrorless camera has a full frame sensor and 42.4 effective megapixels. The highest resolution from any DSLR in the world comes with the Canon EOS 5DS at 50.6MP.  Mirrorless cameras can’t compete on battery life, but that’s just a matter of time.  Slowly, mirrorless cameras will continue to pick up the slack. We’ll see a slow but sure shift to the smaller, cheaper models.

Constant Connectivity.  Today you can only wirelessly transfer Jpgs, not Raw.  The speeds are slow and you are limited by distance.  These problems won’t exist forever.  Imagine not needing a memory card for your camera.  This would allow camera manufacturers to make smaller systems.  It also saves you money and means you are no longer limited to 8, 16, 32, 64 or 128 GB.

After perfecting this technology, next to come will be wireless charging.  Imagine a camera that isn’t limited to batteries or the maximum power they hold.  A portable battery pack could allow you to shoot for days, not hours. The technology exists for smartphones, so it’s only a matter of time.

Immersive Photography.  What is to stop us from capturing objects to allow us to see it from all sides. We already have this technology with 360-degree product images.  Sneakers float and rotate in a white space.  You can walk around a statue, as if you would in real life. You can spin, zoom and move around at your own leisure. This technology isn’t new.  Google has been using 3D technology for its Google Maps and Earth for a while now.

Attach these images and concept to a Virtual Reality headset and what do you have?  Something between the Matrix and the Metaverse.  An immersive idea where you could actually see and touch said statue, building, city.  Looking at a family photograph is a great way to reminisce over past memories. But what if you could walk around the image as if suspended in time.

Digital sensors will only grow (albeit with limitations). They will provide us with more and more detail in larger resolutions.  Processes like these are quite lengthy to capture and process. As technology gets better, the time spent will also reduce.  An image holding a terabyte of information is not a million miles away.

 

Immersive photography technology will enable us to see/experience objects and scenes from all sides.

AI Will Change Everything.  We already covered photographs creating a 3D world that would be completely immersible. AI (Artificial Intelligence) is what we have to thank for this technology.  In the future, we will see AI take over a lot of our photographic tasks. We could all enjoy better, faster and more intuitive autofocusing. Imagine entire scenes and subjects, captured with a perfect exposure automatically. 

Not only will we see improvements with our cameras, but also, with our computers and image editing software.  Machines will improve and software will recognize every element in your scene. If it knows what it is, it can act accordingly.

Once AI becomes well implemented, time spent editing will reduce.  Imagine your uploaded photographs automatically cull themselves, leaving you with the best shots. Then you don’t need to go through hundreds of images to find where the person’s eyes are open. On top of selecting these images, applied adjustments will base themselves on previous behavior. That’s the benefit of AI, it learns from your choices.