In the days before Photoshop (1984) | Retro

Today, it doesn’t surprise most of us to hear that pictures in a fashion magazine have been retouched, but it was the breakthrough of 1984.

For many years, Polaroid was a world leader in photography. Their instant cameras were hugely popular, as it meant photos could be viewed minutes after they had been taken.

In this 1984 story from “Beyond 2000”, Iain Finlay reported on how the Polaroid Corporation was developing an amazing new technology that allowed photographs to be digitised and then seamlessly manipulated.

Photographs were being scanned onto a computer and altered, so that logos could be added or the colours changed. He even suggested the potential for people’s heads to be rearranged onto different shoulders! “What about that old saying – that the camera never lies.”

Amazing as it was in 1984, the process could only be done by professional operators in a specialised computer laboratory, using state of the art drum scanners and photo enlargement techniques.

2015 update

Today digital image manipulation is so common that we even have a word for it. To “photoshop” an image is to digitally manipulate it. (Photoshop is the name of an image manipulation application which has become so successful that its name is frequently used as a verb). Even professional photographers have come to regard digital “post” as a fairly standard part of their workflow. The images you see in magazines or on billboards are rarely unedited.

There is a certain irony in that when the Polaroid Corporation did this original research into photo manipulation technology, there was no such thing as a digital camera. These only became commercially available six years later in 1990, and instead of relying on a chemical film that could be exposed only once, they stored the image on a silicon chip that could be erased and re-used over and over. Digital cameras rapidly came to dominate instant photography.

The original Polaroid Corporation was slow to see this threat to its core business and was forced to file for bankruptcy protection in 2001. The brand name lives on but under a different owner.

(c) Australian Broadcasting Corp
http://abc.net.au/science