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Darkroom manipulation
The term originates in the photographers dark-room, and sadly I am old enough to have literally "dodged and burned" photos under the enlarger!
An "enlarger" is simply understood as a projector. It beams light through a negative and onto photographic paper. In much the same the way the lens of the camera "printed" the light onto the ...
4
Just to round out the answers so far, Billy Kerr found two early references to "dodge" in a photographic capacity in 1883 and 1889.
A manual of photographic chemistry : theoretical and practical by Hardwich, T. Frederick (1883):
An important advantage in this process is the following : That although it is one entailing the operation
of a so-called “ ...
4
This is a guess off the top of my head, since I don't know for sure. It probably has its origins in old film camera dials, specifically the "landscape" mode in fully automated/computerized cameras of the early 1990s.
I have an old Canon EOS 500 35mm SLR (from 1993) with a Landscape icon on the Mode dial. It doesn't look exactly identical, it has a ...
2
This has nothing to do with Geocities as such. When people began making websites in the early days of the web, it was a very different environment. There was no high speed broadband, only very slow dial-up modem connections.
Because of that, images file sizes on web pages had to be kept as small as possible so that they would load in a reasonable amount of ...
1
According to dictionary.com:
ORIGIN OF DODGE First recorded in 1560–70; of obscure origin
It means to evade or avoid, as in "to dodge/evade the ball in a game of dodge-ball" or avoid as in "to dodge/avoid a difficult question"
In our darkroom we used to call it "blocking" the light, so the term "dodge" in Photoshop was quite foreign to me until I ...
1
Bauhaus?
This is a minimalist answer.
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