nfscd # 3
Tuesday, March 4, 2008 at 08:52AM 
Self promotion pieces • click to embiggenI was the first photographer in Pittsburgh to dive into the digital darkroom with a Mac/Apple IIci and Photoshop 2.5.
The IIci has a 25mhz processor and a 40mb hard drive. It maxed out at 128mb of RAM. FYI, at the time, 1 Mb of RAM cost around $50 so my IIci maxed out at 32mb of RAM. Processing speed was a tad slower than a snail on downers.
Photoshop 2.5 didn't even qualify as a pale imitation of its present self - the first stab at layers, limited masking, no image previews, (to see the effect of a filter, you had to apply it and then wait - sometimes wait and wait and wait - up to 10 minutes or more with some filters. If you didn't like the result, undo it and start again.), and, BTW, only one undo ... Even back then PS had powerful, pre-press capable color editing tools but I also used Painter because it had superior brushes, masking and layer blending capabilities and files could be moved back and forth into Photoshop.
In any event, making photo-based illustrations like Waist Knot and Cafe Society was a long and tedious process which was why, after a long day of photo editing, I turned off the work software and got lost (on occasion, until the sun came up) in the world of MYST.
Reader Comments (2)
Yeah… I remember those days. It's all true you all. I was there.
Especially the "Myst". That was cool to watch. I recall a photoshop illustration of a young "Coma Girl" holding her own
disembodied head.
Mark,
I learned PS 2.5 on a Mac IIfx. I don't remember how much RAM was installed, but I used to read while waiting for filters to happen it was so slow sometimes. I can't believe I've been using PS for that long!