Graphic Software For Startup

[Ian66]

Ah yes, dear old Quark which followed Pagemaker . . . and before that all those hours spent entering commands directly into a monotype imagesetter. . . and before that hand-chiselling individual characters into stone blocks.

But you tell this to the kids nowadays and they don't believe a word!

As a photo litho apprentice in the 60's we had to get a grip of all the basics of printing processes including hand compositing. Mixing up similar looking bits of lead type my first effort should have read 'The first printed book' When inked up and printed however, it read 'The fist printep dook'
Who remembers colour separations on glass plates, then onto film and a machine called a klichograph which produced 4 colour halftone separations onto wax plates. Not a computer in sight!

[ukuwi]

I come from a printing family, mum worked for a local printer and my dad worked on the linotype machine in fleet street for the daily Telegraph and HMSO and I can remember him coming home at 6am splashed with lead, hot metal workers they were called, your comment reminded me, took me back to my childhood it did. then at 16 I started working in a printers, didn't last long though, and here I am again all these years later trying to learn the art once more, must be in my blood.

[Ian66]

Don't get me started on the nostalgia trip! Just a quick memory relating, sort of, to the original point of this post. The company I worked for, in Norwich, were responsible for printing sections of the Freemans mail order catalogue. This was in the days of (very) flared trousers and the models were anchored to the ground with thin cord to pull out the flares to show them to their best advantage. It was our job as retouchers, to remove these cords. It was done by a process called dot etching which involved a chemical called potassium ferricyanide or ferri for short (No health and safety in those days!) We would brush the solution on to the images on film to reduce the dot size in any particular area. This would also be done to clean up highlight areas so the dots were all the same size on each of the four colour separations, to avoid any colour cast. Today, a couple of keystrokes in Photoshop and a bit of cloning does the same thing in a fraction of the time. Happy days though!