Artists went wild, working with a melange of tools to pierce, scratch, dye, heat, paint, and push the films. Greek-born Lucas Samaras was the first to move the developing color dyes of the newly introduced SX-70 film with a blunt stylus. His straight forward shots morphed into monstrous visions of the human body. Students studying photography in the '60s at Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts claim that they were the first to transfer their images to watercolor papers substituted for the positive sheet of peel-apart film. Now artists transfer the Polacolor dyes to stone, gold leaf, beeswax, glass, silk and other unconventional or exotic surfaces. The Italian artist Paolo Gioli seems to do the impossible by successfully transferring black-and-white images to fine papers. Many photographers said it couldn't be done; yet he did it.

Many photographers are also painters, sculptors, designers, and potters, using oils, acrylics, pencils and inks to enhance their photographs. Hand-coloring black-and-white prints is not a new practice, but some applications are rather unorthodox. Luciano Franchi de Alfaro, originally from Cuba, brings the saturated hues of the Caribbean in vivid, free-flowing brush strokes to his prints. Graphic details are painstakingly created when he taps out design elements by puncturing the print with a needle, first through the front, then through the back of the photograph. The design is tactile.