Before there was Photoshop

[D. Bryant]

http://www.petapixel.com/2010/11/03/soviet-image-editing-tool-from-1987/

[pherold]

That's fascinating that they could get that good of quality back then. In color too!

When I first saw your heading I thought it would have to do with something like this:
http://www.colorwiki.com/wiki/File:Analog_photoshop.jpg

[paulr]

Really cool. The user interface with all that text looks totally vintage sci-fi. It's easy to mistake the cyrillic for Klingon.

[Frank Petronio]

There were all kinds of photo editors pre-Photoshop and well through the mid-90s.... Freaking Scitex retouching cost mint, $1000 for a drop shadow, $2000 for cleaning up pimples.

Ah I made mint for a few years during the transition too, $400/hour easy.

Then every bozo Art Director got a copy of Photoshop and the market collapsed to basic freelance fees.

[grahamcase]

How about before there was 'before there was Photoshop':

George Hurrell photo of Joan Crawford, before retouching the negative:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_htpVvj0sh1c/SxLq94m-KwI/AAAAAAAAC-w/4FCJ3ihKJmo/s1600/Crawford+Unretouched.jpg

After retouching the negative:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_htpVvj0sh1c/SxLrFTDcwdI/AAAAAAAAC-4/MZ4ycqTvrjo/s1600/Crawford+Retouched.jpg

[D. Bryant]

How about before there was 'before there was Photoshop':

George Hurrell photo of Joan Crawford, before retouching the negative:


No shit? Who would have thought.

[Frank Petronio]

I wonder how much was soft-focusing versus actually marking the neg?

In the 80s Elizabeth Taylor's retoucher moved back home to Rochester to dry out. He was plenty busy but he retouched a few commercial shots of mine, he used pencils, air brushes, knives... probably one of the most skilled commercial artists ever. (And Elizabeth Taylor needed him by then!)

I think all those skills have been lost, I don't know anyone who is good at it. Maybe marking up an 8x10 with a pencil and Spotone but nothing on a high-end level.

[Marko]

I think all those skills have been lost, I don't know anyone who is good at it. Maybe marking up an 8x10 with a pencil and Spotone but nothing on a high-end level.

Well, nobody does professional drafting any more either. But I wouldn't call those kinds of skills lost, I think replaced is much more accurate word. These types of crafts still exist, only they are now done using different technology.

[paulr]

Well, nobody does professional drafting any more either. But I wouldn't call those kinds of skills lost, I think replaced is much more accurate word. These types of crafts still exist, only they are now done using different technology.

Well put. Who would want anyone to mess with their negative with knives and ink?

[bob carnie]

Hi Marko

I was a professional photo comp artist in the 80's using rubylith, knives and register negs and pos methods.
I never thought I would go back in time, but right now we are using registration, ruby and multiple register for alt printing and those skills I gained back then are now once again being put to use thanks to digital negatives.
Never would have thought this to happen.

Bob


Well, nobody does professional drafting any more either. But I wouldn't call those kinds of skills lost, I think replaced is much more accurate word. These types of crafts still exist, only they are now done using different technology.

[SamReeves]

In Soviet Russia we Photoshop you! LOL.

Great video.

[jp]

I used to use Aldus photostyler (along with pagemaker) before Adobe bought Aldus. Only then did we transition to photoshop. Mostly used it for scanning and post-scanning adjustment.

[cosmicexplosion]

Hi Marko

I was a professional photo comp artist in the 80's using rubylith, knives and register negs and pos methods.
I never thought I would go back in time, but right now we are using registration, ruby and multiple register for alt printing and those skills I gained back then are now once again being put to use thanks to digital negatives.
Never would have thought this to happen.

Bob

Hi Bob how do you think Hurrell touched up the neg to make it softer?

in my mind adding any thing on top makes it darker, and i am not sure how he would have got the freckles out and smoothed it all up.

cheers to revival!

andrew

[David A. Goldfarb]

Pencil on the neg makes the image lighter, not darker, so you can pencil out freckles, lighten up wrinkles, and generally bring up the value of the face quite easily. Hurrell would shoot with a sharp lens, not a soft lens (at least not later in his career. He used soft lenses in his earliest work, then switched to a Goerz Celor), and preferred the glow from clean skin using makeup only to define the eyes and lips, and then he or his retouchers would clean up the skin blemishes on the neg. You can smooth out the retouching marks with a blending stump (kind of a tight roll of paper a bit thicker than a pencil, usually cut on the diagonal), and Hurrell was also known to apply powdered graphite to smooth out the texture of the skin. If you've tried this, it also has the effect of bringing up the value of the skin 1/2 to 1 stop or so, so it's like having another light.

You can also tone down a hotspot with a knife or with an abrasive reducer to thin out an overly dense section of the neg. The knife is also used to sharpen fuzzy lines. If you see Victorian photographs of live toddlers with sharp fingers, this is probably the result of knife work on the plate negative.

A certain amount of experience in working on negs is infinitely useful when working in Photoshop.

[Frank Petronio]

Retouching the negs was an important reason to use an 8x10 as they could see what they were doing. Also they would dupe negs for riskier work - for more extensive work they would airbrush paint onto prints and rephotograph them.

In Rochester we had a fairly famous retoucher for Elizabeth Taylor move back here to dry out, he made a lot of money because Liz needed a lot of work.

But there were more blue-collar retouchers around and for $20 to $100 they could fix most anything from removing power lines to fixing portraits. I used them in the 1980s.

Around 1988 or so Kodak had quite an impressive and expensive digital retouching system, I think it was $500K or so. But Scitex also had mature software and skilled operators, I bet they were well ahead of the Soviets at the same time. There were even some individual photographers with elaborate custom PCs and software, the name Ron Scott comes to mind. Check out the retro tech: http://www.ronscott.com

http://bybee.com/ Gerald Bybee was an early Photoshop artiste, he even borrowed one of my ideas once ;-0 but he was pretty darn good regardless.

Remember this one?

78593

[David A. Goldfarb]

I used to know someone whose parents were commercial retouchers working for the big school portrait studios, and I'd imagine outfits like Olan Mills and such. They would get long rolls (70mm or 46mm were the standard formats) of color negs and retouch the zits out of all those senior portraits with dyes and brushes. It only took a few minutes per neg, as I understand it. Sometimes you see Adams Retouching Machines with the rollfilm transport and usually two magnifying glasses for this purpose. There was also a higher powered binocular magnifier for 35mm and 46mm negs.

[Frank Petronio]

Yeah and the retouching machine "jiggled" so as to make the retouching marks blend better. It was quite a skill, there were more women doing it back then for some reason.

[E. von Hoegh]

When I saw this thread I thought it was about these:http://www.google.com/imgres?q=airbrush&um=1&hl=en&biw=1280&bih=878&tbm=isch&tbnid=yCPTXmkG__uMgM:&imgrefurl=http://www.missing-lynx.com/reviews/other/tamair/tamair.htm&docid=yfBusd0uEkNpLM&imgurl=http://www.missing-lynx.com/reviews/other/tamair/hgs.jpg&w=600&h=394&ei=R6ImUMvqLuO-0AG1u4GADA&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=960&vpy=196&dur=754&hovh=182&hovw=277&tx=166&ty=119&sig=104269408465861440321&page=1&tbnh=148&tbnw=232&start=0&ndsp=20&ved=1t:429,r:4,s:0,i:150

[jnantz]

Hi Marko

I was a professional photo comp artist in the 80's using rubylith, knives and register negs and pos methods.
I never thought I would go back in time, but right now we are using registration, ruby and multiple register for alt printing and those skills I gained back then are now once again being put to use thanks to digital negatives.
Never would have thought this to happen.

Bob



i know what you mean bob ..
i apprenticed with a portrait photographer in the 80s
and was taught lead negative retouching as well
as abrading film and and using a knife an graphite dust on prints as needed.
i don't do alt process but still use some of those skills when i retouch a scan.

john

[RichardSperry]

Yeah and the retouching machine "jiggled" so as to make the retouching marks blend better. It was quite a skill, there were more women doing it back then for some reason.

I remember visiting a couple graphics houses(photoshops) in the 80s, I remember a large light table, in a large darkened room, where maybe 8 people, mostly women, were doing what was called negative stripping. They were editing the negatives with Exacto knives, large containers of fresh blades and loupes littered the light table.

Also there was, this was 1985-6, a large expensive computerized scanner/editor, in a special air conditioned room, whereby the operator was editing sweaters for a catelog. And with a click of a button would change the color from blue to red or green. It was very high-tech at the time. Looked far superior to the Soviet version.

I believe one of the businesses was called Quadra Color. One was the photoshop for the ad department of the Sacramento Bee.

[RichardSperry]

How about before there was 'before there was Photoshop':

George Hurrell photo of Joan Crawford, before retouching the negative:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_htpVvj0sh1c/SxLq94m-KwI/AAAAAAAAC-w/4FCJ3ihKJmo/s1600/Crawford+Unretouched.jpg

After retouching the negative:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_htpVvj0sh1c/SxLrFTDcwdI/AAAAAAAAC-4/MZ4ycqTvrjo/s1600/Crawford+Retouched.jpg

I never thought of Joan Crawford as being attractive until you posted this. Beautiful eyes.

I wonder why the editor left a black mark on her nose. Excellent work despite the mark.

[Jay DeFehr]

Bob,

I'm using the same techniques, too, but I don't think anyone is working this way, commercially. Few techniques ever vanish entirely, unless dependent on some unobtainium. I even use knives and dyes, etc., but not on anything irreplaceable.

[cosmicexplosion]

you gotta admit it looks more realistic than alot of the modern photoshoped plastic barbies....i mean it looks like her skin!

[Amedeus]

Around 1988 or so Kodak had quite an impressive and expensive digital retouching system, I think it was $500K or so. But Scitex also had mature software and skilled operators, I bet they were well ahead of the Soviets at the same time. There were even some individual photographers with elaborate custom PCs and software, the name Ron Scott comes to mind. Check out the retro tech: http://www.ronscott.com

http://bybee.com/ Gerald Bybee was an early Photoshop artiste, he even borrowed one of my ideas once ;-0 but he was pretty darn good regardless.

Remember this one?

78593

I remember this one ... met Gerald a while ago ;-)

As for Photoshop and digital in the early age ...

I built my first analog/digital camera in 1982 while I was still in Belgium. Used a 3 Vidicon Sony broadcast camera and converted the 3 channels A/D (6 bit/color !!!) and fed the data in to a Seiko Multiprocessor Computer based on Intel Multibus II. The graphics resolution of this computer and by such the resolution of the camera was 512 x 480. Color resolution was limited by the video board to 2 bit/channel or 64 colors. The system was only good for still images and it took 15-20 seconds to acquire or scan the image. Bottleneck was the speed of the A/D conversion process. As I didn't have a color printer at the time, I used to take images of the screen (35mm) ... lol ...

Wrote a bunch of filter, high pass edge detection and convolution software in assembler (8086) for image processing. These routines interfaced with the Basic interpreter from the Seiko Multicomputer. This project and my work in computer music got me a spot on television to talk about the impact of digital technologies in art in 1984/1985.

I built a monochrome version running on a Zenith S100 computer at the same time for my own purposes using a low cost CTV camera

Just dating myself. Digital image processing was a reality in the late 70's based on the textbooks in image processing I still have.

Photoshop and editing ... that's another story !

[Jim Jones]

I have a 90-year-old 8x10 glass plate negative that is about 50% covered by graphite as seen by reflected light. I was tempted to remove the retouching to compare before and after prints, but haven't the heart to mess with the retoucher's artistry.

[cosmicexplosion]

so ya reckon they just used a pencil, i mean for the graphite?

[David A. Goldfarb]

Yes, absolutely, mechanical pencils in a lead holder with leads of different hardnesses, sharpened to a long point with a sharpening stone.

[cosmicexplosion]

amazing, and it looks better than the trillion dollar pootar industry.

you sure they dont use russian space pens?

[Kuzano]

Before there was photoshop, or any other digital manipulation, there were wire handles with pieces of odd shaped cardboard pieces on the end, and tiny little 2-3 hair paint brushes. Now, those were the days... image manipulation required time, talent and motivation ($$$$)

[David A. Goldfarb]

you sure they dont use russian space pens?

It is said that the Russians solved the problem of writing in zero gravity by using pencils as well, so you might say, yes, they did use "Russian space pens."

[Frank Petronio]

The story was something like, NASA spent $3 million on the problem of writing in Space and the Russians took a pencil. Smart.

Later, pencil shavings helped to start a fire around a short circuit and burnt up three cosmonauts in their capsule, so they ordered a gross of Space Pens from an ad in the back of Popular Mechanics.

[RichardSperry]

http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp

[Joseph O'Neil]

During WW2 pornography was used a lot in propaganda and pyschological operations. I remember a TV show a few years back where and elderly British woman had to alter a negative by hand to show Hitler masterbating. Seriously. You can see the result yourself on this link

http://www.psywarrior.com/sexandprop.html

Just be warned that while this page is fascinating, it is positively and absolutely NSFW. But also remember, everything on this page was produced and paid for by government money of one nation or another.

Anyhow she had to do this all by hand,and the kicker of the thing was according to the interview, the image you see was the second one she had to do. Her commanding officer thought she did a very good jog on her first image, but Hitler's - well, you know what - was too big, and there was a war on you know. :)

So yes, amazing what you can do without photoshop
:D