

A short history of image manipulation before Photoshop - samclemens
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/04/short-history-image-manipulation-photoshop

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greggman
Here's a longer history

[http://design.osu.edu/carlson/history/PDFs/paint.pdf](http://design.osu.edu/carlson/history/PDFs/paint.pdf)

My personal experience was there wasn't much software for truly manipulating
_photos_ on PCs or anything else a average non pro would have access too
before photoshop.

Everything I'm aware of before photoshop in the PC space was basically a pixel
editor. It might have had brushes like Deluxe Paint. It might have supported
24 bit images maybe possibly. But it didn't have any things I thought of as
"photo" manipulation like adjusting hues, values, curves, blurring, burning,
dodging, smudging, etc. etc. They just let you draw solid colors shapes,
possibly gradients, and cut and paste, maybe rotate, scale, and warp.

~~~
richardjdare
The problem was that stock Amigas and older PCs didn't have true colour, they
mostly had index-colour modes where each pixel was a lookup into a table of
usually up to 256 colours, rather than a direct RGB value.

Doing photo manipulation operations would have been difficult unless you did
everything on a logical 24bit document and constantly resampled and dithered
down to an indexed screen mode. I don't know if anyone tried this, but I
imagine it would have been slow and hard to work with.

The Amiga had HAM and later, HAM8 which allowed 4096 and 262000 colours
respectively, but they were cumbersome for editing; they were more a means of
displaying renders or scanned images than anything else.

I remember the Amiga having 3 tiers of graphics program. You had pixel editors
like DPaint, Photon Paint, or Brilliance, then you had image processing
programs like ADPro (Art Department Professional) and ImageFX. These programs
could perform convolution filters, image composition etc. And with 24-bit
output. But they did so in a almost batch-program-like manner[1]. You couldn't
paint or play around with things like in Photoshop.

At the very top of the tree you had programs like TV-Paint and ToasterPaint
which ran on high-end Amigas with expensive 24bit colour boards. I only ever
read about these programs, they were inaccessible to a teenage hacker. While
they let you edit images in 24bit colour, they were geared more to video and
broadcast graphics. They were closer in spirit to the Quantel Paintbox or
Symbolics S-Graphics than the print-oriented Photoshop.

Towards the end of the Amiga's life there was Photogenics, which was probably
the closest thing to Photoshop, but by this time Amiga devs were consciously
playing catch-up with the PC and Mac and the users were moving on to other
platforms.

[1] (edit) Here is a video of someone using
ADPro.([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ef32uNqdIE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ef32uNqdIE))
You can see that they use a text-ish interface to select a number of
operations to be performed on an image. They then click "execute" and wait for
the result to be rendered.

------
beloch
I'd be interested in seeing a history of early photo editing software. I
remember editing photos in the 90's (I still have some print-outs of the
results), but I have no recollection of what software I was using other than
that it was _not_ photoshop!

~~~
digisign
Paint shop pro was a good one i used in those days.

~~~
weland
I remember it fondly as well. It was a lot cheaper but had remarkable
capabilities. It kept getting more and more bloated though. I think version 9
was the last one that one could actually use.

------
agumonkey
My grandmother had a picture of her 4 children from the early 50s. Just faces,
floating in diamond arrangement. I remember being greatly confused by that,
unable to imagine compositing in those days.

Also, my father was into photography in the 70s, there were a few books about
it in his desk. Last year I opened one. Every filter name I saw in 90s picture
editing software was listed in it, in fact they were all photochemical process
filters that were lifted in digital editors.

------
regehr
Awesome books on this topic:

[http://www.amazon.com/Commissar-Vanishes-Falsification-
Photo...](http://www.amazon.com/Commissar-Vanishes-Falsification-Photographs-
Stalin%C2%92s/dp/1849762511/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Photo-Fakery-History-Deception-
Manipul...](http://www.amazon.com/Photo-Fakery-History-Deception-
Manipulation/dp/1574881663/)

~~~
seszett
> Stalins

Interesting how your first link get displayed in fixed-width Asian-style
characters here in Chromium, apparently because of the apostrophe (which
itself is the only character displayed with a narrower width). Just removing
the apostrophe in Chromium's address bar immediately makes all the text go
back to a normal font. Firefox just shows "%C2%92".

Actually, it looks like what gets displayed as an apostrophe is just a control
character, _U+0092 <control> = PRIVATE USE TWO_.

Interesting glitch.

