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Soviet Image Editing Tool from 1987
- wazoox 16y agoImpressive... Looks like many american movies, too :)
- dabeeeenster 16y agoMore interested in seeing the Soviet Synthesizer that's providing the background music!
- myth_drannon 16y agoThat'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.
- Robin_Message 16y agoThanks, I wanted to know that! I thought I recognised the tune from a piece of dance music—I think it's the tune in Resurrection by PPK, who covered it according to wikipedia.
- iloveyouocean 16y agoLink to original. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJj9y4t9UnU&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJj9y4t9UnU&feature=relat...
- myth_drannon 16y agoHere again it was a British device - SYNHI-100 :)
- phreeza 16y agoIt 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 http://www.dutchcowboys.nl/images/upload/trotski.jpg
- gcv 16y agoI thought the same thing, but then realized that, by 1987, retconning the early days of Bolshevism was a low priority.
- kls 16y agoFor a good book on this, take a look at the commissar vanishes. It is a pictography of soviet photo editing to remove the undesirables.
- g_lined 16y agoThose pictures are from either different photos or different frames in a video. Do you have a link to the webpage discussing them? I realise it may not be possible to present the same frame with Lenin and without, but knowing whether they were taken several minutes or seconds apart would be useful in understanding the power of the tools the were using.
- khafra 16y agoThere's a museum exhibit of Stalin's own B3ta.com from back in the day, called The Commissar Vanishes: http://www.newseum.org/berlinwall/commissar_vanishes/ http://www.newseum.org/berlinwall/commissar_vanishes/
- JshWright 16y agoSome 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.
- varjag 16y agoLooks like it was very low contrast rather than blurry.
- icegreentea 16y agoAs 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'.
- yatsyk 16y agolooks like unsharp mask http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking IMHO too excessive at this picture
- ceejayoz 16y agoI 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/vanishes.htm http://www.newseum.org/berlinwall/commissar_vanishes/vanishe...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- huhtenberg 16y agoYou are off by several decades with your suspicion.
- ceejayoz 16y agoThe linked examples are. The practice itself probably didn't go away.
- huhtenberg 16y ago> 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?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ceejayoz 16y agoThe linked video takes place before the fall of the Soviet Union.
- jablan 16y agoNot 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-milosevic/photo-essay-how-milosevic-controlled-the-media/874/ http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/episodes/media-by-milosevi... I know, not '80s, but '90s and not ex-SSSR, but close enough.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoOne of the comments reminded me how great Deluxe Paint was (I used the PC version): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint
- joezydeco 16y agoI 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.
- tyng 16y agoWhat industry is this?
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoI wouldn't be surprised if people working on 2D games for gameboys etc still used it.
- colinprince 16y agoI 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.
- jacobolus 16y agoIf 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.]
- sedachv 16y agoOne 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 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-gollum/page/2,1 http://www.awn.com/articles/technology/two-towers-face-face-...). You can still buy a copy, but it's not under active development: http://www.izware.com/mirai/ http://www.izware.com/mirai/ (the texture painting tool is pretty cool: http://www.izware.com/mirai/paint.htm 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.
- myth_drannon 16y agoIt'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/ http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/history/107465/
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- nkassis 16y agoHehe, some countries still do this today ;p Not naming anyone because I don't want to start a flame war. It happens in "developed" countries too.
- Dylan16807 16y agoHonestly, it's more annoying for you to specifically not name anything.
- nkassis 16y agoHere's an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat_Operating_System_Solutions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat_Operating_System_Solutio... From the article: "the most meaningful product to come out of the Indian software industry"
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- tjic 16y agoSo three years before a consumer grade tool existed, a research grade tool existed? Name one area of technology where this was NOT the case!
- ceejayoz 16y agoThat doesn't make it any less nifty to see.
- brudgers 16y agoAfter 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 http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=307
- dholowiski 16y agoCome on, nobody? Ok I'll do it... "In Soviet Russia, image edits you!"
- rbanffy 16y agoI wonder what's the Apple III doing...
- ratsbane 16y agoI 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.)
- enf 16y agoIt 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.
- rbanffy 16y agoIt's too close to the original to be a clone. I grew up with Apple clones (computers couldn't be imported to Brazil until my college years) and they all looked as different from Apple IIs they could while using the same parts. Sadly, nobody here made an Apple III clone.
- confuzatron 16y agoWhat's that piece of music at 2:30? I've heard it before in some cheesy techno dance track I think.
- dotBen 16y agoYes, 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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipE9QFiWhzQ
- myth_drannon 16y agoIt's from a very good movie called Sibiriada. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBkdlnsKVYU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBkdlnsKVYU (around 5:00 min)
- hackermom 16y agohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJj9y4t9UnU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJj9y4t9UnU It's Eduard Artemyev, by many considered "the Russian Vangelis". His work has been truly defining for a handful of Russian sci-fi masterpieces.
- sliverstorm 16y agoDid 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)
- enf 16y agoMost copy machines these days are actually scanners, and can do an 11x17 page at 600dpi in about a second.