Most of us have see this gif by now, and what we currently do to make people look perfect for advertisements. I was curious as to how models have been edited before computers were around. Some more specific questions I have are:
Photography of actual models wasn't very important in advertising until the 20th century. Newspapers used some fairly crude methods by the 1910s, such as silhouetting figures by painting around them with white gouache (paint), or inking/painting dark areas. By 1930, more sophisticated retouching was done with an airbrush that could create areas of varying tone. Another technique was to paste the head from one photo onto the body shown in another photo and then rephotograph the resulting collage.
Many of the tools in Photoshop mimic the earlier tools and techniques, but Photoshop has made it so much easier that retouching has become much, much more common.
Editing has always been done to an extent. For example, in the photographs of Matthew Brady of the Civil War, he rearranged some of the bodies for a better photo. Then, photos of that era, all the way through the 1950s and maybe 1960s, were edited. For personal photos, they might be hand tinted. For news photos, the photos had retouchers draw lines on the photos to make them clearer--the photography equipment then was not as good as today's equipment, nor was printing, so a photo in a newspaper might look muddy and difficult to see if not for that retouching. Also for photographs done by professional photography studios, they'd basically paint over the photo to erase wrinkles and lines.
There have been various photo-retouching scandals over the years. I remember there was a photo of Oprah sitting on a pile of money that was actually Oprah's head on Ann-Margret's body, and that was scandalous. Here's an article that will interest you: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/oprahs-head-ann-margarets-body-a-brief-history-of-pre-photoshop-fakery/258369/
Another huge scandal was the OJ Simpson Time Magazine cover scandal. Time manipulated a photo of OJ when he was arrested in 1994, to make him look darker. The fakery was made the more obvious because the other major news magazine, Newsweek, used the same photo for its cover, but didn't manipulate it. See: http://potz7.wordpress.com/2011/09/
In the novel 1984 (read it if you haven't!), the protagonist's job in a future dystopia is to manipulate photos and news articles to reflect the current political needs. So he might remove the image of someone who has been disappeared and made to have never existed. And add the photo of someone who the party wants to support. The Soviet Union did this for real: http://historyjk.blogspot.com/2012/09/key-personality-josef-stalin.html
