Photoshop hasn’t always been powerful when it comes to features. This was tricky when editing photos with no layers, styles, and only one undo back then.
Many moons ago, Adobe Photoshop had fewer features than it does today. Early versions of editing software couldn’t even use layers or styles. These restrictions may sound hard to believe these days, but it’s something that a lot of costume retouchers are starting to get into on their own. One of these editors is Colin Smith belong to VideoRevealed who recently recounted his experience using the program in the 1990s.
In this dense video, Smith walks us through hundreds of examples of his work from his advertising days and how he painstakingly craft his creations with the most basic of tools. We hear about everything from adding realistic shadows to objects to “cloning” everyone without the powerful features we’re used to in current versions of Photoshop. It is truly insane to hear Smith talk about the many jobs that took him hours or days to do when today they take only minutes to achieve.
While this video is unlikely to give you any major technical instructions on how to edit your work today, the examples shown can give you a new appreciation of how much the heaviness of Photoshop for you. Listening to Smith’s story about his days as a photo retoucher feels like a walk on the memory stream with an old friend who has plenty of great photos to help visualize the story. If you want to revisit how difficult it is to make the most basic edits in Photoshop, this video is well worth a look.
What do you think of Photoshop stories from the 1990s? You may have used the program with too few features? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
