Retouching, unsharp mask, editing levels? The Russians got there well before the Americans.
Another fabulous archive feature from Wimp.com. Some years before the now ubiquitous Photoshop introduced us to retouching, the Russians were already at as you can see here. OK, we can laugh at the Tomorrow’s World Russian style antique computers but it’s a pretty fascinating look at how they tackled the problem of retouching digitised images pixel by pixel.
Unfortunately, the soundtrack is only in Russian and the quality of the film is not too brilliant, but you can see what they were getting up to then. I would hazard a guess the footage is from at least 25 years ago.
It’s also a shame the examples do not include any dramatic rewriting of history as dissidents get erased from official photographs.
Anyway, these days when you open up Photoshop you get a bunch of credits. I wonder if any of those were Russian defectors?
