Photographers just ain't what they used to be

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, March, 1990 by Margaret Hunter

Photographers just ain't what they used to be

Cincinnati--Photographers aren't just photographers anymore.

Take, for example, Alan Brown, a photographic illustrator known beyond his hometown of Cincinnati for his people-oriented images appearing on annual reports, posters, advertisements and magazine covers.

Brown uses in-house computers to create images that, until recently, would have been impossible to produce without substantial help from outside labs and photo services. Whereas Brown used his computer for only 5 percent of his work a few months ago, now he's using it for over a third.

Brown once hired a photo lab to do compositing (combining multiple images) and color correction, and an air brush artist to do retouching work. Now, he can achieve many of the same effects with his Macintosh IIx computer, Adobe's PhotoShop software, which appears in retail stores this spring, and the Scitex Visionary system at a service bureau in Columbus, Ohio, to create complex images, largely without leaving his office.

But getting an image into his computer is easier than getting it out, Brown complains. Three methods exist to output computer-generated images: using film recorders, which convert the digital image to photographic film; shooting a photo of the monitor, which introduces some distortion; and employing digital means such as equipment made by Scitex, Hell, CyberChrome and others. Brown has long been familiar with the Scitex system as a means of producing high-quality separations from digital data. But recent innovations in software now allow him to get the same quality--and retain complete control over his images. Scitex "has been a way of computer retouching," says Brown. "But there were always compromises. I had to rely on [the Scitex operator's] hands and eyes to put together my vision. The images began to lose their identities."

Furthermore, Scitex is expensive. Even since prices dropped to their current $200 to $800 per computer hour, "it's still fairly out of reach." Scitex does, however, provide "the closest one-to-one relationship with what appears on the monitor," Brown says.

How it works

For the cover of its January/February issue, How magazine wanted to combine several photographs into a new image. Brown was presented with the initial concept by the magazine's art director, Carole Winters.

After discussing stylistic options, Brown collected photographs, did a shoot to add a new visual element and sent everything to be scanned at Kreber Graphics, a Columbus-based separation house with Scitex Visionary. Kreber returned to Brown a Syquest hard-disk cartridge with a picture file for each image. The files were in Scitex CT format, which analyzes color according to CMYK, the four process colors.

To display the images on Brown's Macintosh screen, however, he needed to convert them to an RGB (red, green, blue) format. Adobe's PhotoShop, for which Brown is a beta-site tester, provided the conversion, which represnts a breakthrough: Now, he can work with images for as long as he wants, instead of sending directions to the Scitex operator. "I can experiment," says Brown, who has been a partner in his own firm, PhotoDesign, for nine years. "The only thing I have to lose now is my wife's patience."

Once fine-tuning was completed on the How cover, Brown reconverted the new file into Scitex CT format; the bureau made film separations and a proof.

"You can do separations with PhotoShop," Brown notes, "but I don't." If he did, he would use PhotoShop to produce four files, one for each separation, to be output on a PostScript device such as an L-300. When he tried this recently with another piece of software, though, the results didn't reproduce well.

Brown also works with such other photo-manipulation software programs as Data Translation's PhotoMac and Letraset's ColorStudio. "Each one has a few tricks the others don't, so I end up working with a little bit of everything," he says.

However, Brown admits frustration with PhotoMac's lack of a 24-bit version, which Data Translation is currently working to produce, and its reduction of background files to black and white. "With the other two, you can see where you began and where you ended up. You can't with PhotoMac because the inactive file is black and white." On the other hand, Letraset's prices tend to be higher, and ColorStudio includes many complex features, he adds.

"The best feature of all of them," he says, "is the undo command. It allows you to experiment and play without any risk."

The Mac doesn't necessarily speed things up, however. "If a project has a two-day working period, I can accomplish far more on the computer. It hasn't saved time; it has created more possibilities."