Remember scanning?

[Andy_warp]

Just wondering how many people on this site had to scan boxes and boxes of 35mm slides?

It was painful but gave me some serious Photoshop skills!
It's why I get my hackles up when I see awful images used in layouts that came straight from a digital camera!

The quality is so much better now with digital technology...or at least much more easily attained.

I'll never forget cloning out dust and lint in a 6400 ppi image!

 

[myront]

I used to work for a guy who set up a box with mirrors and slide projector. One end sat the projector the other end had a digital camera. Click next slide click camera to take a snapshot...click next , click camera....

something like that.

 

[Andy_warp]

Scanning film was the best you could get back in the day. Digital cameras were garbage.
We looked at it as a pretty big responsibility...it might be the last time that "thing" was intact.

It also taught us to MANAGE our assets, something I see too few people take the care to do anymore.
All of the embedding and converting...no one knows which one is the master!

It also took an hour to transfer links for pagemaker or whichever flavor...a gig was SOMETHING!

Just reminiscing...

 

[Solventinkjet]

My first job in the industry was to scan Solo cup boxes and then re-create the graphics in Illustrator and match it up with a die file they would send me. Basically just making old artwork they used to do by hand and convert it to digital. I can't remember the last time I scanned something now that I think of it.

 

[Andy_warp]

My first job in the industry was to scan Solo cup boxes and then re-create the graphics in Illustrator and match it up with a die file they would send me. Basically just making old artwork they used to do by hand and convert it to digital. I can't remember the last time I scanned something now that I think of it.

My first job in the print industry was to collate blank 5 bank tabs. Cases and cases of them! I did it for awhile but moved into the diazo department. Blueprinting was better!

 

[Johnny Best]

Since we are reminiscing, worked for an engraver who would burn the artwork onto a coated metal plate with a large stat camera and acid etch the line work onto the plate and them mount it on plywood, then routed out to be used to make newspaper artwork for advertisement.
35 mm slides were the thing to watch as a kid. My father had thousands of them. All the solders after WWII bought cameras from Germany, Roliflex, or Japan,Yashica, and took pics of everything.
Also did sign layouts on vellum, put the vellum on the blueprint paper and into an aluminum tube over a jar of ammonia to make blueprints for permits and shop drawings.

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

In 40 years, what will they be saying about the things we're doing now?

 

[Johnny Best]

In 40 years, what will they be saying about the things we're doing now?

In 50 years from now maybe you will be telling of how you use to write with a pencil and be on a sign forum on the old slow internet.

 

[TimToad]

In 40 years, what will they be saying about the things we're doing now?

Is this waterproof? The life raft has a leak.

 

[Andy_warp]

Since we are reminiscing, worked for an engraver who would burn the artwork onto a coated metal plate with a large stat camera and acid etch the line work onto the plate and them mount it on plywood, then routed out to be used to make newspaper artwork for advertisement.
35 mm slides were the thing to watch as a kid. My father had thousands of them. All the solders after WWII bought cameras from Germany, Roliflex, or Japan,Yashica, and took pics of everything.
Also did sign layouts on vellum, put the vellum on the blueprint paper and into an aluminum tube over a jar of ammonia to make blueprints for permits and shop drawings.

Sweet! I made every blueprint for the Tacoma Dome parking garage! 180 originals times 100! It was 1 in 1 out before digital.

There's nothing like walking through a light trap door to the photo room!

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

I've been into "Mad Men" on Netflix, and it's neat how stuff was done back then. Mother smoking and drinking while pregnant, guys drinking and driving without a care, no one wearing seat belts... EVERYONE smoking.

I'm sure in 40 years we'll....or I mean, some of us... will look back on manual driving and think that was crazy and reckless.


Or maybe holographic signs???????

 

[Andy_warp]

Reprographics was my college, and I have got a good handle on the graphics and cadd side of things.

I've been a machine tech...talking to the president of Contex scanners in Devon Energy fixing their $60,000 scanners.
I worked on Oce's and HP's.

I have built a color management system for grand format dye sub department...with instruction from this very site.
I was told it couldn't be profiled and I brought back an old printer from the dead, that had sat for years, and built an incredible profile.
With the wizard.
Every day was like Christmas compared to what was pushing out of it before.

In the early 2000's I had a 60" hp...and a Xerox 6060, both with front ends.
I loved that shit, but left to learn cad.
Now I love cad. And dye sub.

Have a couple 100' x 4' double sided fabric banners coming up...along with a 100'x12' pole pocket.
The big stuff is why I love it. For E3 last year I printed 2 double sided 200' x 30' walls, and one 100' x 30' double sided wall.
All PMS 485C. Man! That art template I sent was 2800" or something...it was the inside wrap.
My prepress master counterpart laid out and we printed 100 126" x 380" prints!

Ever loaded a 126" x 400' roll of paper by yourself?

Loading it is how you succeed. Nail it down...and good to go.
I've mounted 10' x 5' glossy printers...I've done laminating, surface and encaps.

I've always found a way to meet or exceed the expectation of my customer.
No bitching. People have to renumber a friggin 30 page pdf and its an all afternoon affair.

Now I can draft about any shape in 3d and create templates, print art accurately color wise and size wise.
I saw the bottleneck between "graphics" guys and "cadd" guys in the mid 90's and learned both.

All because I wanted to know more than a kludge to get me through the next job.
And not using the practices my "educated" clientele paid for. I learned exactly what not to do.

There are no manuals for establishing process control in an uncontrolled environment.
I do all my own maintenance on my $250,000 dollar grand format inkjet and my $150,000 heat press.

People I know in other professions really have no idea what to say when I tell them that I am a printer.
But how do I explain what I really do.

 

[Andy_warp]

...and honestly. I've had to print bs that is way worse than some of my slide scans...you know that I cared about...at 20 feet wide.
It's heartbreaking.

 

[Andy_warp]

Is this waterproof? The life raft has a leak.

I like this comment a lot. Accurate I guess.

 

[Andy_warp]

Helping out my customer with exactly where their text will fall on this wavy shape.
I get to do fun work.

 

[Andy_warp]

One day as a printer tech on a 36" b & w engineering copier...I lost a spring in the machine.
The whole machine would not function, so I had to order one.

A day or two later I go and install the spare (I bought 6 or 7)

Put her back together. When I picked up the paper roll/spindle to load the thing the spring fell out right by my foot.

Good times.

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

Andy... calm down, you having a conversation with yourself.

 

[Andy_warp]

In 40 years, what will they be saying about the things we're doing now?

The progress has been exponential the last decade , so it does seem absurd to talk about jaz and zip drives. And pagemaker. (was better than indesign) haha

Working in the late stages of photo to digital imaging was pretty cool for me to see as a newbie.
We had a cruise camera this place I worked. A million dollar camera!

It could shoot a letter size image and make a 96"x48" in one step...that used to be a thing...how many steps?
Eventually keeping the chemicals fresh cost was more than the demand for the product.

We had this other thing that was a retrofit scanner that would slide into the lens of the overhead on track black and white camera.
You could scan at 400 dpi 8 foot by 4 foot...high tech!

I still think the stuff we work with now is exciting but the people I used to interact with through the business actually wanted to be doing it too.
Collating those tabs is what me grab hold of digital machines!

 

[Andy_warp]

Andy... calm down, you having a conversation with yourself.

It's therapeutic...and isn't making signs about when people say "Nice!"

Consistently hitting it ain't easy.
But only signmakers can know some of this crap.

Thankful for your advice.

I can't even get perfect rolls of stock but people want perfect prints.

And they have to truck it from the OTHER coast! Truck it!

No oops...we ran out!
My bad!

You said it buddy.

 

[Andy_warp]

I've been into "Mad Men" on Netflix, and it's neat how stuff was done back then. Mother smoking and drinking while pregnant, guys drinking and driving without a care, no one wearing seat belts... EVERYONE smoking.

I'm sure in 40 years we'll....or I mean, some of us... will look back on manual driving and think that was crazy and reckless.


Or maybe holographic signs???????

All true. I miss grit. And class.