Topic: Faking it without PhotoShop

[Alan]

Happened across this article this morning >

Very interesting and made me think, how did they do that?
I have seen these and similar in books before.

"Faking It: A Visual History of 150 Years of Image Manipulation Before Photoshop"



http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/10/23/faking-it-met/

[mcduff]

I was talking about that stuff with a friend recently. We were thinking back to a lot of album artwork done by design group Hipgnosis. Of pre-photoshop manipulation. Crazy stuff and lots of work. This friend, who is a bit older and probably of the age of the hipgnosis dudes has shown me some of the images he created. Lots of tedious cutting of masks, angling the paper holder, and no "command z" haha.

Crap, I remember screwing around in early versions of photoshop before layers existed (eg photoshop 2.5.1) and you did everything using 'channel operations' and even then that was farty stuff, but seemed like a revelation at the time ;-)

[Francois]

What amazes me is the amount of mechanical effects that were used to make those covers.
Nowadays, this is pretty much all gone. Not just because of Digital manipulations, but mainly because of the size of the media.
We started getting less interesting album covers when the CD came along. The format is such a small size that elaborate artwork just didn't work as well as a 12 inch sleeve. Graphic designers pretty much all consider the CD as the smallest thing you can effectively design. Since it's the cover that sells, things had to be made much simpler. Then came Photoshop followed by the MP3 tag... just try and get some impact on an iPod's screen!

[LT]

yes - this kind of thing makes my brain ache. So much thought and work preparing masks and splicing negs.

[euge...]

Obvious but still a favourite

[moominsean]

That dali isn't faked. I've seen the outtakes. Miserable wet kitties.

[euge...]

Fair enough .Ive seen the some of the preceding images somewhere.It was more the 'without photoshop' that I was leaning on.

[Francois]

I remember seeing somewhere a picture of the queen and two guests. Due to some political thing, one of the guests was replaced by a flower pot