At 6:48 AM 12/13/2, Tom Green wrote:
> I even fondly remember using Lettraset's Imaging app and
> tearing my hair out trying to find something that was
> compatible with the freaking RIF format.

If I remember correctly, the RIF in Zimmer & Hedges' ColorStudio was a
TIFF-like format which included compositing info not available in other
tools back then. (Adobe took over Photoshop at just about the same time,
and there was later a significant alpha change in Photoshop 2.0.)


> The King was Kai Krause- KPT anyone ?- who termed these
> things Channel Operations or CHOPs. Let's see? Anybody here
> remember having to float a selection and how frustrating that was?

I've still got print outs of the Kai's Power Tips from the Photoshop SIG on
AOL. ("Kai's Power Tools" came later... Ben Weiss made some remarkable
innovations over the years.)

It's still funny to go to groups.google.com and search with "herasimchuk
floating"... he took a lot of heat for the changes in PS4.



At 7:41 AM 12/13/2, Michael Knauf/Niles wrote:
>Maybe it was X-res or X Res Macromedia's answer to LivePicture, promising
>app that was stillborn... Right about the time I was trying to work on a
>600+ megabyte composite for an 8 x 80 foot duratrans... Remember the
>photoshop feature that let you open a portion of a large document, edit it
>and have it recombined into the larger doc?

I don't remember the term Photoshop used to pull a small piece out of a
file so they could work on large images. That was a hot issue back then.

Kai Krause was the big early proponent of LivePicture, which used a small
proxy image to accumulate a set of compositing instructions which would
later be applied to the large image while you went for lunch. I remember
being baffled at the time by Kai's comments that "it doesn't use pixels",
but it makes sense... don't operate on all those pixels while you're
sitting at the design table, just remember what the designer wants to do
and process it all later.

xRes used a similar proxy technique, but it offered a series of proxies at
various resolutions so you could zoom in, and also offered painting and
filtering as well as compositing commands for the final offline rendering.
These were just instructions, so multiple-undo was a big advantage.

Both of these tools handled large bitmaps much more efficiently than
Photoshop. But then the bottom dropped out of the RAM market and big fast
machines reduced the need for faster software. If the timing was different,
who knows how things might have turned out...?


jd





John Dowdell, Macromedia Developer Support, San Francisco
(Best to reply on-list, to avoid my mighty spam filters!)
Technotes: http://www.macromedia.com/support/search/
Column: http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/jd_forum/
Technical daily diary: http://jdmx.blogspot.com/



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