Topic: "What did we do before Photoshop?"

[sapata]

Very interesting exhibition to see for those in NY.

It makes me feel less guilty when using PS...

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2012/11/slide-show-what-did-we-do-before-photoshop.html

[Photo_Utopia]

When I first used Photoshop in 1994 I was coming from a traditional darkroom background, the tools in PS were named after the ones I'd been using for years so the understanding of PS wasn't hard; continuity was ensured by that.
The difference is in the ease of use, only a few people ever made masks in the darkroom, local area retouching was done afterwards with dyes and pastels which then needed sealing.

A negative that needed work could take many hours, I remember painting white backgrounds with negative opaque on a 45° lightbox with a massive magnifier–steady hands took about half a day!

Victorians did lots of negative sandwiches (no mayonnaise please) because the emulsions they had were blue sensitive only, so they had to make cloud negatives.

So yes nothing is new with regards to process, just anyone can do say an unsharp mask in seconds with no skill, something that took a skilled technician many hours.

[Suzi Livingstone]

The same thing I did after we got Photoshop. Nothing. 

[Paul Mitchell]

Pre-Photoshop days I used to work in studio in London that photographed and produced artwork for mail order catalogues (Grattan's, Great Universal if anyone remembers!). We used to have the photographers shoot everything in proportion to the actual page layout and it was our job to splice and compose the large format transparencies to make up a whole page. As many as 35 transparencies could go into making one page! All the original transparencies we had to cut with a scalpel and bond them together with Chloroform. I just remember being so nervous the first time I did a page as one slip and you were dead! I remember quite clearly the studio manager checking us a regular intervals as it was quite easy to knock one's self out if you used too much Chloroform! Can you imagine what health & safety would say now! All I can say was thank goodness when Photoshop arrived!

Paul

[Francois]

I think you mean chloroform...

[Late Developer]

The first iteration od Photoshop I ever got was CS3 Extended. It was a version that I coud not register (if you know what I mean  ) and it is still the version I use to this day.

I have never learned how to use it to anything like the extent of its capabilities as the main reason I use it is as part of a hybrid film to digitised negative workflow - due to the fact I no longer have a darkroom and I have to make do with professionally produced inkjet prints.

When I shoot digital (not all that often - although I was the main photographer for the local insurance institute dinner last Friday and most of the attendees / organisers wouldn't know the difference between a good photograph / chemical print and a digital file / inkjet print) I usually process via Nikon Capture NX2 and send them a CD full of JPEGs.

To be fair, Photoshop CS3 is a great piece of kit and, as a result of my need for a hybrid solution, it's a necessity. I would genuinely struggle to produce a scanned negative that wouldn't need something - even if only sharpening and re-sizing - before being posted on a website or printed.

One of the things I refuse to do, however, is any form of what is referred to as "HDR" or "Tone Mapping". I'm sure there are worthy exponents of these processes but 99.9% of what I've seen to-date looks like psychedelic, migraine-inducing pastiches or cartoons. The best HDR images are the ones where you can't tell that the technique has been used.

So, what did I do before photoshop? I struggled. Don't like to admit it but it has been my digital darkroom and I have a lot of respect for it - when not over-used.

[Paul Mitchell]

I think you mean chloroform...

Oh yeah that's the one Francois... am green with envy with your powers of observation 

[Francois]

You mean chlorophyll is getting to your skin

[Ordinal]

I started out being very purist about just using straight scans without tinkering, then I read about analogue print-making and the techniques that were used to get the final image most like how you'd seen it at the time and perhaps went a little too far in the other direction... and now I think I'm more balanced. In most cases I scan with a linear curve, only boosting parts in unusual circumstances like night street pictures, and I may play with them a little in Aperture but not a lot.

I suspect that most people who shoot film these days are at least partially interested in the qualities that film images produce, so they won't want to mess with those significantly. If I'm shooting with even cheap consumer colour film I'd like to see what it looks like with the colours that the film captures, not what results after I've auto white balanced and generally digitally enhanced. If I can get it looking noticeably better and more like how it felt to see the scene, fine, but that's individual work on an image for artistic purposes.

[Francois]

This sort of makes me laugh. In the early days of Photoshop and a bit before, when big studios used a special computer called Paintbox, I dreamed of doing work like what was possible on these machines. When I had my 80386 and a 256 color super VGA card, I thought I was almost in the big leagues. But when I started trying to do good work with it and realized how much work it actually was, I grew very disenchanted. I never had the patience to put a full day's work on a single image. So now, apart from the odd job removing a telephone pole, I simply fix the dust spots and overall colors. I try and do the least amount of work for the maximum effect. I don't even bother to do complex masking jobs to darken the corners and enhance clouds...

[Late Developer]

Some of this reminds me of a "would Ansel Adams have used Photoshop if he were still alive?" thread on another forum a few years ago. It's impossible to say, of course, but as he was involved with the development of instant photography with Edward Land in the 1940s, my guess is that he'd certainly have toyed with it if not been won over by it.

I doubt many of us are into "digital imaging" (i.e. the extreme end of Photoshop's capabilities that takes a digital capture and produces something that is unrecognisable as a - or the original - photograph). However, I see no issue with using software to manipulate a digital scan to produce, as near as possible, to the dodged / burned wet print I'd hope to produce in a darkroom. But no more.

Where it really scores for me is being able to convert a colour neg (or slide) into black and white.

[LT]

Very interesting exhibition to see for those in NY.

It makes me feel less guilty when using PS...

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2012/11/slide-show-what-did-we-do-before-photoshop.html

Thanks for the link Mauricio. Great stuff. The skill and effort involved in these composites blows my mind.