Photoshop was a lot of fun in the early days but not if you were into continuous tone color – the kind of color that pictures, not illustrations are made of. Not that complex illustrations were a snap either. While the developers of Photoshop were integrating volumes of color science into their program, they were also testing the limits of available computing power.
Prior to the release of version 1.0 in 1990 we had lots of opportunities to try and generate film for creating proofs of what was possible from the application. I was running a testing and training lab at Scitex America at the time. They were the first high-end developer to have a link from desktop Macintoshes to their high end layout and output devices. Getting four-color film from a Linotype at the time was an art practiced by the high priests of PostScript. We bowed in their general direction and crossed our fingers every time we tried to output a contone image.
First silkscreened print from Photoshop 1.0b by Lance Hidy
And so it was when my friend and neighbor, Lance Hidy, an Adobe font creator, consultant and illustrator approached me. As a beta tester for Photoshop, he was anxious to output his desktop created design to 6-color separations for screen printing. As a fellow traveler I was also interested in seeing what could be done and had boxes of free demo center film to use trying it out. Scitex made the finest software at the time for creating color separations and licensed most of their scanners, film setters and proofers from other companies. The problem we had with Photoshop was that although contone images were generally output at 300 dots per inch, line drawings at 2500 line per inch and so on, we required much lower resolution on the film with the same precision to satisfy Lance’s design and produce a high-quality print. The Photoshop software had no problem dealing with that. But Lance wanted color image separations at 42 dots per inch for silk screening. The massive flat bed Raystar plotter (film printer) and the software that drove it thought we were wrong and kept attempting to correct our silliness.
Much command line trickery and a pile o’film later and the separations were done. Master screen printer Rob Day, doing his last project, performed the silk screening. What it was in the end was the first high-end color separated output from Photoshop used to create an in-register silk screen print. Acknowledgement of this fact is screened into the border of the print. Lance never got his 42 DPI separations – the best we could do was 65 DPI. But he did get the result he wanted, a blocky and well-defined print where all of the separations were in register. Making that happen with a print that was 34-inches by 16-inches was hard work on Scitex equipment driven by an 8088 processor and minuscule amounts of RAM. To my knowledge, film of that size was not possible from Linotype film setters at the time.
Magnified view of art showing pixelated background design
Note: In 1988, three companies licensed display PostScript from Adobe for use on their monitors: Scitex (now split up into pieces, some owned by HP), NeXT, Inc. (owned by Apple) and Digital Equipment Corp. (now part of HP).
