The moment that decided you wanted to do this

[Doug Nelson]

Whatever "this" is. Retouching, photo restoration, compositing, photo art, 3D, whaever your jam is. What was the thing you saw or experienced that made you say "I want to do this"?

For me it was Hipgnosis. Not really one specific image. More the moment I realized most of the covers from my favorite albums were all credited to the same guy (pre-internet I assumed it was one person and had no way of learning otherwise for many years).

What was yours?

[Repairman]

Re: The moment that decided you wanted to do this

When I got my hands on a Quantel paintbox in the late eighties I was pretty well hooked. The intuitive user interface kept all the tech stuff hidden so that you could concentrate on the arty farty bit. Blending two images together with a soft edge airbrush was magical to those of us using magic marker pens. I jumped ship from creative to 'production' and have been retouching since. As soon as photoshop could handle large files without crashing every five minutes the big hardware systems (Scitex, Crosfield, Hell etc were consigned to history.

[Greg Curran]

Re: The moment that decided you wanted to do this

I am still trying to block out why I am doing this,

[joe_7]

Re: The moment that decided you wanted to do this

Interesting bit about the paintbox, I remember seeing some cool TV segments back in the day.

I didn't really get into restoration myself until I got Corel Photo-Paint for cheap from the college bookstore. It wasn't as robust as Photoshop, but got the job done.

At my picture framing job, customers were asking me for the service and my boss didn't care. (The restoration work helped pick up some extra framing orders for the business.) Haven't done much lately, though.