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DPChallenge Forums >> How'd They Do That? >> River Bend
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06/23/2011 09:09:50 PM · #1
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How'd They Do That
'River Bend' by GeneralE

View this tutorial here.
06/23/2011 09:30:17 PM · #2
I haven’t got the time to try out your methods described in the tutorial right now but I will definitely be giving it a go soon. It looks quite in-depth and hopefully easy to follow for a pp luddite like me (my photoshop 6 is 10yrs old and I’m still afraid to explore what it can do). Thanks for producing this for us.
06/23/2011 11:40:39 PM · #3
Originally posted by Abra:

... a pp luddite like me (my photoshop 6 is 10yrs old and I’m still afraid to explore what it can do).

I got you beat -- this was all done with PS 5.0, a couple of years older than your version. ;-)
06/24/2011 05:25:29 AM · #4
Where the heck do you learn to do stuff like that?! Without guidance from, er, yourself? Impressive - I have no idea what most of that said but I will be giving it a try when I get home.
06/24/2011 07:14:19 AM · #5
I successfully used my first layer (one) in PP last week, so this will be a snap. hehe.

Thanks for explaining these things to guys like me. Will go and practice.
06/26/2011 08:39:51 PM · #6
Originally posted by FrankRobinson:

Where the heck do you learn to do stuff like that?! Without guidance from, er, yourself? Impressive - I have no idea what most of that said but I will be giving it a try when I get home.

My experience with editing photos goes back quite some time before digital images were common.

Starting in the early 1980s, I worked in the pre-press department for an offset print shop. At that time, that involved setting type on dedicated photo-typesetting machines, which exposed high-contrast photosensitive paper through a spinning disc of black film with clear areas for the various characters (quite as amazing technology as laser printers). The paper was then developed in a processor, coated with a tacky wax, and cut and pasted-up on special layout boards. These were then placed on a special "process camera" which would make a film negative of the paste-up board, which would then be used to expose the metal plate put on the printing press..

Typically, if there were to be photos on the page, the paste-up would include only a black rectangle, which would form a clear window or mask for the photo to later be "stripped-in."

The photo itself would be shot separately on the camera, filtered through a special piece of film containing a pattern of areas of varying density. When high-contrast graphics film is exposed this way it leads to the creation of black dots of varying sizes or a "halftone" image, creating the illusion of shades of gray using only black and white ink.

Color photos required a separate halftone film for each of the four "process inks" (the subtractive colors Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black), and the dot pattern on each had to be aligned a precise angle; this job was usually farmed-out to specialty shops. At this time, the newest method involved using large "drum scanners" using photo-multiplier tube technology, and costing upwards of $200,000 (1980 dollars).

Our shop was an earlier adopter of the Mac/PageMaker/PostScript/LaserWriter desktop publishing (DTP) pathway, and served as a "service bureau" to output high-resolution files created by customers. As less-expensive (< $2,000) grayscale scanners and digitized images started to come into the picture (sic), my boss suggested that I learn the Mac and associated skills, as they'd soon be replacing most of my darkroom work. About this time ...

Originally posted by Wikipedia Article on Photoshop:

Early history:

In 1987, Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display. This program, called Display, caught the attention of his brother John Knoll, an Industrial Light & Magic employee, who recommended Thomas turn it into a fully-fledged image editing program. Thomas took a six month break from his studies in 1988 to collaborate with his brother on the program, which had been renamed ImagePro. Later that year, Thomas renamed his program Photoshop and worked out a short-term deal with scanner manufacturer Barneyscan to distribute copies of the program with a slide scanner; a "total of about 200 copies of Photoshop were shipped" this way.

During this time, John traveled to Silicon Valley and gave a demonstration of the program to engineers at Apple and Russell Brown, art director at Adobe. Both showings were successful, and Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute in September, 1988. While John worked on plug-ins in California, Thomas remained in Ann Arbor writing program code. Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990 for Macintosh exclusively.


Sometime in 1991 or 1992, when the Barneyscan had been adapted to scan color film up to 4" x 5", we got one; it included some classes on using Photoshop (by now v. 2.0) for image-editing and some other software dedicated to making the RGB-to-CMYK conversion, using controls analogous to those found on the drum scanners. At that point the page-layout programs (mainly PageMaker and QuarkXPRESS) had been adapted to handle multicolor images, along with imagesetters capable of outputting films with the appropriate dot-patterns accurately enough to meet the requirements of the presses.

I've pretty much been using Photoshop ever since, though I actually stick to fairly simple (but very powerful) techniques I learned back then; using Curves, Masks/Selections, and the Info Window are really basic skills anyone using the program should be familiar with. Almost all of my editing is still done using PS 5.0 (seven full upgrades ago); for "photography" I don't find I really need much else, at least not for the investment in new hardware, software, and time it would require at this time. ;-)

Photoshop Release History
Photoshop article at Wikipedia
08/29/2011 11:11:31 AM · #7
There is a lot to be learned in this and all the other tutorials on the site. Bumping this one as it is most recent, to get the attenion of those looking for ideas for the WPL, and/or the knock-out side challenge.
03/11/2012 09:25:54 PM · #8
Thank you for writing up this how to! I'm going to focus on this technique for the next while and see if I can get anywhere with it. Thanks again.
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