Pour les Nerds

OhioDanceI worked on this poster at a pre-press shop around 1984. I used a Crosfield scanner & the photo came in as a retouched 8x10 transparency. The scanner was a large drum scanner that used an arc lamp for a light source. It was a two part beast that cost about $200,000 and required a special controlled environment. One piece was the analyse side & the other was an expose side. You didn't scan to a file you just digitized & streamed the info from the analyse side to the expose side (in a darkroom) where green lasers zapped out halftone dots onto a film for the 4 printing colors.
This was pre Photoshop but the scanner had a number of color correction controls found in Photoshop like curves, levels & selective color and it had USM, UCR & GCR (or PCR) that smokes Photoshop to this day.Anyway, there was no visual preview, the operator just had to go by the numbers. He had to memorize a bunch of numbers too, because there was no GUI with pop down menus. He had to input the 'cal' number to get to the operation he wanted to perform.
Somewhere along the line, Crosfield came up with a gizmo called a Scan View. Not only did it give the operator a visual preview, it gave him the ability 'mask' sort of like Photoshop's Select>Color Range. You were limited to 4, I think.
It was a large console thing that kinda looked like an arcade video game like Galagia (SP?). The keypad was pretty much the same as the scanner's. It had a track ball to move the cursor around the image.
The scanner was attached to a really dumb computer called a Scanner Display Terminal (SDT) that allowed the operator to save set ups & automate tasks. It ran on 2 7" floppy disks. Formatting & initialising these things took about 14 steps back in the old days.
I cannot remember exactly how you scanned to the Scan View but the operator would take the 7"floppy with the set up over to the Scan View, insert it & call up the setup & after further edits, save & take it back to the SDT to scan the art.
This particular transparency, because it had been chemically altered, wasn't seen well by the scanner so I globbed it onto the Scan View to use the masking functions to get some of the shoes that weren't coming up right. It was one of the few times we ever used it for something other than just messing around. No idea if the dot etcher worked the films afterward or not.
Maybe I should change the name of this blog to Grandpa's Slide Show...