In Part 1 I wrote about how my role as a photographer was to deliver a good negative or chrome. Someone else, either the finishing lab or a pre-press house did the post-production work.
Kodak PhotoCD and Photoshop
Photoshop came out around 1990. We started using Photoshop 2.5 sometime around 1993. At the time we were delivering thousands of slides to a customer who was scanning them. They were paying a service bureau $10 per scan and deducting it from our invoice. So we did some research and decided we could have them scanned elsewhere onto PhotoCD and do all the prep work ourselves in Photoshop for a total cost of about $2 per image. We used a company called Pacific Color in Seattle, I recall, because they offered quick turnaround.
It was necessary to color correct the Kodak PhotoCD images because what came out directly off the CD was strange looking–gamma and colors were way off. We also started re-touching using Photoshop’s clone tool. I hired someone and trained them to do all the Photoshop work. Our goal was to make the GIF on the screen look exactly like the slide on the light table. (That’s right, GIFs were used before JPEG became standard. Work that was printed was output as TIFF files.) We also made some composite images for posters and other advertising. This was really hard because there were no layers back then. When I say we, I mean the people that I hired. I didn’t actually do it myself, so I never really developed those skills personally.
Bringing Graphic Design In-House
About this time, a photographer friend of mine took a pre-press course at the local college. He had studied graphic design as well as photography. The first project he and I worked on was a 6-fold color brochure for a golf-course resort. I helped him light and shoot all the shots, which were on medium format. Then he had the chromes drum scanned and did all the Photoshop work himself. He also did some compositing. I remember the dining room had a Christmas tree blocking the window (it was shot in December). He removed the tree in Photoshop and replaced the view out the window with another shot. By doing this work himself my friend was putting some pre-press guy out of business.
[An aside. There was pre-press guy that had an 8x10 process camera on the floor above our studio. His business dried up practically overnight around 1995 or 1996. He started drinking during the day, wandering around the building intoxicated and would pass out on the couch in his office.]
It seemed that by the mid 1990’s, photographers had started doing the work that was formerly done by the pre-press houses and guys with process cameras. Now I see the work of photographers like Dave Hill and others it looks like photographers have taken back many of the post-production tasks of re-touching, compositing and pre-press.
So I guess nowadays the photographer doesn’t just deliver the camera original, but the whole finished piece. Things have come full circle back to the old days of the glass plates when the photographer did all the steps. With digital photography and final delivery on the world wide web, there is no longer a need for either the finishing lab or post house.
Or is there?
