In the late 1990s, desktop computing became powerful enough to do the digital imaging work of a Quantel Paintbox machine, the leading digital imaging technology of the time. In 1998, the Quantel Paintbox machines cost around $150,000 per unit (equivalent to nearly $250k in 2019), and the post houses were charging clients $450/hour to do post-production compositing and digital retouching work. The cost of entry to set up a post-production facility was in the millions, and the price of a tricked-out G5 Mac computer was about $3,500 (today’s equivalent of nearly 7k). At that time, I began to do post-production retouching and compositing on my own Mac G5 power PC in Photoshop for many of my clients to save costs and maximize budgets. Several ad campaigns and some notoriety in the press from my work put me in a position to start my digital imaging shop, Lux Imaging, with partners Jim Deyonker and Che Graham. The “One Love” composite was a self-promotional digital imaging piece I created from a series of 100s of photographs of a single model – Savana Samson—many thanks to the late great photographer Richard Dean for working on this project with me. The “One Love” promo piece showed that complex compositing and digital retouching no longer relied on the big production houses and costly machines but more on the talent of the artists themselves. 

Food for thought;

With decades of experience as both a product designer and production manager, my journey with Adobe products has been a source of continual inspiration. Witnessing the ongoing evolution and improvement of these tools, I’ve come to appreciate the vital role of customer feedback in this process. It’s through this feedback loop that tasks, once laborious and time-consuming, have been transformed into seamless actions that now take mere seconds. Embracing a customer-centric approach to product development is not just a strategy; it’s the cornerstone of fostering a loyal customer base, ensuring they return to your products and services year after year.
 

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