
Soviet Image Editing Tool from 1987 - Maakuth
http://www.petapixel.com/2010/11/03/soviet-image-editing-tool-from-1987/
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myth_drannon
It's not Soviet , it's French ! It's a PERICOLOR-1000 system with a software
translated to Russian. They used to buy hardware and software in the West and
change it a bit(translate) and present it as one developed internally in some
scientific institute.

Here is the discussion in Russian: <http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/history/107465/>

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yan
I _love_ the fact that the blog post is titled "Олдскульный Фотошоп", which
transliterates to English as "Old-school Photoshop"

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eru
It actually transliterates to something closer "old-schoolnyi photoshop". I
love it, too.

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phreeza
It would be so funny if one of the examples were: Herse's Trotsky with Lenin.
Wow now he's gone!

edit: like here: <http://www.dutchcowboys.nl/images/upload/trotski.jpg>

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gcv
I thought the same thing, but then realized that, by 1987, retconning the
early days of Bolshevism was a low priority.

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colinprince
I was using a Scitex imaging workstation before Photoshop 1.0 was released.
There were others available too, like Barco and Paintbox.

The big advantage of Photoshop is that it could run on cheap hardware (Mac
IIcx and IIfx) with decent performance.

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jacobolus
If anyone knows where I can find resources about the history of such machines,
such as early reviews, screenshots or manuals – either of academic research
prototypes or of commercial products – I’d really appreciate it.

I intend to sometime in the not-impossibly-distant future write detailed
descriptions (beyond the level of any of the PS books or online resources I’ve
seen) of all the tools in Photoshop, and some critiques/suggestions for
improvement. A lot of the ideas seem traceable to 70s/80s research at PARC,
NYIT, Stanford, etc., or to these early workstations like those made by
Scitex, Tektronix, etc., but there’s not much material online about all of
that history, so my knowledge of it is pretty sketchy.

[My email is in my profile, for anyone who has advice.]

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sedachv
One very early system was the Symbolics S-Graphics suite, which came out
sometime in 1984. Its main strength was 3d graphics (actually either it or
Wavefront was the first commercially sold 3d graphics system), but the Lisp
Machine versions also came with 2d paint. When Symbolics went out of business
the code was acquired by a Japanese company (Nichimen) and ported to Allegro
Common Lisp on Irix and Windows NT (and later Linux) and sold branded as
"Mirai" as a 3d graphics application (although the 2d paint part was still
there in the form of an integrated texture painting tool).

Here's some scans of an early S-Graphics sales brochure:
<http://www.lemonodor.com/archives/000256.html>

Unfortunately the company basically folded sometime in 2003-2004ish timeframe
- the last work done on Mirai as far as I know was on contract for Weta for
Lord of the Rings (Mirai was used to animate Gollum's face; there's an
interesting article about it on AWN:
[http://www.awn.com/articles/technology/two-towers-face-
face-...](http://www.awn.com/articles/technology/two-towers-face-face-
gollum/page/2,1)). You can still buy a copy, but it's not under active
development: <http://www.izware.com/mirai/> (the texture painting tool is
pretty cool: <http://www.izware.com/mirai/paint.htm>). When I have a spare
million I'd like to buy the rights and release it as Free Software.

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JshWright
Some of those "retouchings" near the end don't seem like they would be
possible, even with today's technology. The bearded guy with with the cool hat
goes from being very blurry to very sharp, with a lot of extra detail
seemingly added out of nowhere
([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2PsiJXswiM&t=02m27s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2PsiJXswiM&t=02m27s)).

Note: I have a hard time using MS Paint, let alone a modern image editing
suite, so it's entirely likely that this magic is indeed possible, I'm just
unaware of it.

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icegreentea
As sister comment suggested, it's increasing the contrast. Normally, it would
not make things look 'less blurry', but due to the way the image is being
captured, the screen likely has higher dot pitch than recording medium their
using, so low contrast areas blur together. As you increase the contrast, then
they start to appear 'discrete'.

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ceejayoz
I love how they call it "restoring damaged images". I suspect the primary goal
was "blot out enemies of the state".

[http://www.newseum.org/berlinwall/commissar_vanishes/vanishe...](http://www.newseum.org/berlinwall/commissar_vanishes/vanishes.htm)

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huhtenberg
You are off by several decades with your suspicion.

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ceejayoz
The linked examples are. The practice itself probably didn't go away.

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huhtenberg
> _The practice itself probably didn't go away._

So you are saying that the practice of editing out "enemies of the state"
still exists in former Soviet Union countries? How exactly do you envision
this happening?

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jablan
Not entirely unrelated, but during Milosevic's dictatorship here in Serbia,
one of government-owned daily newspapers used PS to "slightly increase" number
of supporters on a pro-government rally.

[http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/episodes/media-by-
milosevi...](http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/episodes/media-by-
milosevic/photo-essay-how-milosevic-controlled-the-media/874/)

I know, not '80s, but '90s and not ex-SSSR, but close enough.

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tjic
So three years before a consumer grade tool existed, a research grade tool
existed?

Name one area of technology where this was NOT the case!

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ceejayoz
That doesn't make it any less nifty to see.

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thibaut_barrere
One of the comments reminded me how great Deluxe Paint was (I used the PC
version):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint>

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joezydeco
I know of one industry that is STILL using Dpaint to create graphics and
animations for a certain type of dot-matrix display. It's crude, but nothing
works as well. Also, they have a bunch of tools to read the LBM format and
nobody is available to upgrade to newer stuff.

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tyng
What industry is this?

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thibaut_barrere
I wouldn't be surprised if people working on 2D games for gameboys etc still
used it.

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brudgers
After more than 20 years, I still have rotary scanner envy.

In 1988, I spent several weeks trying to cobble together a prototype for
capturing USGS topographic maps in color using a NewTek Digiview and an Amiga
2000.

<http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=307>

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dabeeeenster
More interested in seeing the Soviet Synthesizer that's providing the
background music!

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myth_drannon
That's a music by a pioneer of Soviet electronic music - Eduard Artemyev. P.S.
Personal opinion he is one of the greatest 20th century composers.

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iloveyouocean
Link to original.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJj9y4t9UnU&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJj9y4t9UnU&feature=related)

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sliverstorm
Did their 23-year old mechanical scanner just scan the photo faster than any
scanner I have ever used? I think it did.

We have come so far.

(Yes, I know, I know. It's just funny)

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enf
Most copy machines these days are actually scanners, and can do an 11x17 page
at 600dpi in about a second.

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rbanffy
I wonder what's the Apple III doing...

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ratsbane
I wondered the same thing. Can anyone tell if that really was an Apple III or
a clone or a coincidence? (I tried pausing in various places but it's
inconclusive.)

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enf
It sure does look like an Apple III. It's not the US model because it has a ><
key (in the modern Backspace location) where the US had a \| key. Actually
probably German because it has the M key to the right of L. I'm pretty sure I
see an Apple logo on the key to the left of the space bar at 1:38.

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confuzatron
What's that piece of music at 2:30? I've heard it before in some cheesy techno
dance track I think.

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dotBen
Yes, I was about to comment on that and saw you'd spotted this too. Bonus
points to you!

So the techno dance track is "PPK - Resurrection". One of my favorites tracks
of all time until now.

I'm guessing that what we heard in the film is either a a traditional Russian
song or a song from the late 80's -- either way it means that PPK ripped it
off and didn't write that catchy hook themselves. I'm very sad to learn that.

 _anyone reading this who has no idea what we are talking about, listen
here<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipE9QFiWhzQ> _

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myth_drannon
It's from a very good movie called Sibiriada.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBkdlnsKVYU> (around 5:00 min)

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wazoox
Impressive... Looks like many american movies, too :)

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dholowiski
Come on, nobody? Ok I'll do it... "In Soviet Russia, image edits you!"

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aquarin
This is not Reddit.

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foljs
Thank you captain obvious (and condescending).

