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It's just not clear to someone with no photographic knowledge. Can't you do that sort of blurring or lightening of a shadow chemically, albeit with a steady han

• justincormack 15y ago
  You could lighten it in the darkroom, which sounds like AP would allow, but not remove it completely.
• andrewcooke 15y ago
  you can try to remove the shadow in the darkroom by "dodging" (blocking light from the projector so that the negative doesn't shine so brightly on the area that will be dark in the final print). but it's very hard to do well for something with a well-defined outline and even if you could match the outline exactly (perhaps by printing a mask) it would look odd because the detail would be missing in that area. that's why something like photoshop doesn't attempt to correct the brightness, but instead "patches over" with a copy of similar texture from elsewhere in the image. but this is all going off on a tangent. it's not really "science" or even "practice" that's important here, but a culture of trust. and so what the newspapers have done is argue along the lines of "people used to trust film photos, so we will freeze things there and allow only what was possible then[1]". so the limits are really quite arbitrary (but not unreasonable). [1] without cutting up and pasting over and ...