Photo skin processing before the digital age

I am certain my high school Senior photo was touched up as my skin looked very good, no blemishes and even color. This was done in '88...how was this done when the photo was on film?

Photo retouching existed long before digital. Hollywood actors would have photographs extensively retouched using many different methods.

Retouchers would frequently work on the negative applying dyes or using pencils. Here is an interesting data sheet published by Kodak which describes how common problems could be addressed by retouching negatives. I expect these are the methods used on your Senior photo.

http://www.kodak.com …port/techPubs/e​71/e71.pdf

The term "airbrushing" comes from the use of a real airbrush to retouch prints. Often a print would be retouched by an artist and the print would then be photographed again.

Back in the day I recall penciling in light areas on negs then using dyes and a fine camel hair brush on the prints. Mind you this was only on 120 negs and larger and in B&W only. I wasn't skilled enough in the darkroom to do this with colour.

Mostly, before digital you really paid attention to lighting and getting it right in camera to minimize post work. Often you would also use filters such as Zeiss Softar filters to soften the effect of wrinkles, acne, etc. Of course I couldn't afford one of those filters back then so I made my own with varying degrees of success.

flowrider wrote in post #13508832
Back in the day I recall penciling in light areas on negs then using dyes and a fine camel hair brush on the prints. Mind you this was only on 120 negs and larger and in B&W only. I wasn't skilled enough in the darkroom to do this with colour.

Mostly, before digital you really paid attention to lighting and getting it right in camera to minimize post work. Often you would also use filters such as Zeiss Softar filters to soften the effect of wrinkles, acne, etc. Of course I couldn't afford one of those filters back then so I made my own with varying degrees of success.

Prior to the mid 60s, retouching large format B&W negatives and prints was a common skill for portrait photographers--it was just part of the job, and a portrait photographer who didn't retouch himself or have someone on staff to do it was not going to stay in business long.

Small cameras (that is, medium format) and color became dominant portrait tools in the mid-to-late 60s, but it was difficult and costly to retouch small negatives and color. So from the latter 60s until the mid 90s, skin defects mostly had to be dealt with as well as possible in the camera. Yes, clever lighting, soft-focus filters, et cetera. In the future that might become known as the three decades no lens was sharp.

That was not a perfect solution and nobody at the time thought it was--the "get it right in the camera" as a moral edict with regards to retouching is something new, and not something ever espoused by professsionals (a professional will say "get it perfected in the most efficient way possible under the circumstances, which is often but not necessarily in the camera, and if it takes retouching, then retouch like a bandit"). The advent of digital photography and digital retouching has actually returned portrait photographers to the level of control they would have gladly grasped in years past.