I love photography.

As someone who cannot draw at all, the ability to capture images and control the things I know how to manipulate gives me a sense of artistic accomplishment.

If I screw something up, there is always software to help me alter variables digitally. Though I am not an expert at taking or editing images, I have enough tools in my arsenal to entertain myself for days.

We tend to think of this kind photographic image manipulation as a Photoshop-era phenomenon. But at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's recent opening of Heinrich Kühn: The Perfect Photograph, I discovered that the practice can be traced to the Austrian pictorialist.

And he did not have a Mac to do so.

This inspired an "Art and About" adventure.

As a scientist, Kühn knew how to work his materials and processes to have the freedom of painting and get the exact color tonalities he sought. The negative was just the beginning — unlike Ansel Adams, who attempted to capture everything in the negative and even devoted a book to this philosophy.

Kühn preferred gum bichromate printing, a technique new for his time. Using pigment in lieu of silver as the light sensitive element (the same pigment that was use for drawings), Kühn would hand-apply the substances to achieve his desired effect. Only the way the pigment was attached to the paper was completely photographic, giving the work the feeling of a charcoal drawing or etching.

His works elevated the stature of photographs as an accepted artistic medium, similar to painting.

The exhibition gives viewers a chance to appreciate Kühn's control, also gaining insights into his thought and creative processes.

Kühn might change the paper, process, color, crop the picture, remove part of the picture or a person, change the sofa, add a highlight or blur a section, and he continued to do so long after he took the negative.

Here is the challenge. Almost like a game of Where is Waldo?, perusing the exhibition is akin to a fun detective game, exercising your power of observation.

Can you find the changes?

Joel Luks gains insights into Heinrich Kühn's works with the help of Anne Tucker, MFAH curator of photography, and Monika Faber, chief curator of photography at the Albertina, Vienna.