Photoshop composite circa 1994!

[Skybuyer]

I came across an old coffee mug that I had done for client's event give-away and had to give it some thought of when I had done it. The boy in the image was 12 or 13 at the time and is now 39 or 40. That would put the image in the circa 1994 range. I believe this was done in Photoshop 2 (not CS2) as it was before layers with ONLY ONE UNDO on an old slow Mac that took 30 seconds or more for each screen refresh! The total amount of time on this single composite image was in excess of 8 hours!!!

So to think about it, I've been doing Photoshop since before 1994, and digital imaging probably as early as 1992 on a Quantel Paintbox. My last roll of film EXPIRED in 2001.

I wish I had access the original digital image which must be on some archived drive I have somewhere amongst the 10-15 drives I have in storage. This image was photographed off a dishwasher worn coffee mug, but I think illustrates what we were able to do back then with archaic tools, still in the digital stone age and I just thought it would be fun to post it for some of the young'uns to see what we were doing even back in the day with limited resources.

 

[eEridani]

Lol - yeah, way back when. Back when digital images were dithered to create a palette useful enough to call photographic. [later 1970's and early 1980's]

 

[Skybuyer]

Lol - yeah, way back when. Back when digital images were dithered to create a palette useful enough to call photographic. [later 1970's and early 1980's]

Back in the 80’s we would shoot in transparencies and then have them scanned at high resolution then sent to have plates made for the press. 2 1/4 was ok, but before that we had to shoot in 5x7 or even 8x10. Wanna buy a 5x7 view camera system or one of my four Hasselblad systems? Below is the last image I shot with a 5x7 view camera.

 

[monteolsen1]

I came across an old coffee mug that I had done for client's event give-away and had to give it some thought of when I had done it. The boy in the image was 12 or 13 at the time and is now 39 or 40. That would put the image in the circa 1994 range. I believe this was done in Photoshop 2 (not CS2) as it was before layers with ONLY ONE UNDO on an old slow Mac that took 30 seconds or more for each screen refresh! The total amount of time on this single composite image was in excess of 8 hours!!!

So to think about it, I've been doing Photoshop since before 1994, and digital imaging probably as early as 1992 on a Quantel Paintbox. My last roll of film EXPIRED in 2001.

I wish I had access the original digital image which must be on some archived drive I have somewhere amongst the 10-15 drives I have in storage. This image was photographed off a dishwasher worn coffee mug, but I think illustrates what we were able to do back then with archaic tools, still in the digital stone age and I just thought it would be fun to post it for some of the young'uns to see what we were doing even back in the day with limited resources.

View attachment 135367

Great job! Especially for that far back. That’s when Apple’s entire OS was on an EPROM and startup was instantaneous. Adobe was a great company then. You really managed to combine the images seamlessly, which couldn’t have been easy.

 

[Skybuyer]

Great job! Especially for that far back. That’s when Apple’s entire OS was on an EPROM and startup was instantaneous. Adobe was a great company then. You really managed to combine the images seamlessly, which couldn’t have been easy.

Thanks. I knew conceptually what I wanted to do and figure out how to do it. The frustrating part was having to wait 30 second or more for the screen to refresh for each move or undo.

I had moved into digital very early largely because it was hard to communicate to the retouchers exactly what I wanted and the amount of time spent with proofing and remakes seemed longer than if I could just do it myself- which proved to be the case. The bad news in switching to digital was that all the manpower that was deligated to the lab or my employees shifted to me. And as noted digital was very slow with the old gear that was available on. Perhaps if I had realized that I’d have stuck with film longer. However digital pushed me away from events and to 95% commercial.

 

[sar104]

Great job! Especially for that far back. That’s when Apple’s entire OS was on an EPROM and startup was instantaneous. Adobe was a great company then. You really managed to combine the images seamlessly, which couldn’t have been easy.

That was rather earlier wasn't it? 1994 was the era of the Quadra, running disk-based system 7 on Motorola 68040 chips. I think the mid- to late-80s Apple II series was the last one using EPROMs for that.

 

[Skybuyer]

That was rather earlier wasn't it? 1994 was the era of the Quadra, running disk-based system 7 on Motorola 68040 chips. I think the mid- to late-80s Apple II series was the last one using EPROMs for that.

Back then the labs had the scanners. The scans were costly too. I recall paying $200 for one scan. It was supposed to be a billboard ad, and to my surprise I learned that the dpi for the board was something like 8 DPI! Other earlier digital work was done on the lab’s Quantel Paintbox where the data was recorded on huge tape reels.

 

[MavicAir2Marc]

That would put the image in the circa 1994 range. I believe this was done in Photoshop 2 (not CS2) as it was before layers with ONLY ONE UNDO on an old slow Mac that took 30 seconds or more for each screen refresh!

Ah, they days of floating selections, I remember them well. We did get to use the Hell scanners mostly 4X5 transparencies back then. We used Scitex Blaze consoles until Photoshop came along...

 

[Skybuyer]

Ah, they days of floating selections, I remember them well. We did get to use the Hell scanners mostly 4X5 transparencies back then. We used Scitex Blaze consoles until Photoshop came along...

We're showing our age, dude! ?
All the stuff we did back in the "olden days" gave us an education that the younger folks will never have. Manual settings. NO auto focus (no auto-anything!), ISO ratings different than what was on the box. Film and lab fees (I used to spend $40k/year on lab fees!). Bulk loading. Dark rooms with enlarger and chemistry. Retouching on actual film and paper.

I found another early composite image that I did. I believe I shot this with my first digital camera, I think an Olympus 1400-L with a whopping 1.4 megapixels!

 

[MavicAir2Marc]

Before the digital age, I was hand developing (and drying on a gas fired drum), 30X40 inch "Super stats" in 24X36 trays. Fun back in the day. I can't tell you how many times I would fall asleep while trying to opaque negatives after being out partying the night before. LOL
Digital imaging certainly has made things a LOT easier these days. I could only imagine trying to edit actual film back then.