It's not Soviet , it's French ! It's a PERICOLOR-1000 system with a software translated to Russian. They used to buy hardware and software in the West and change it a bit(translate) and present it as one developed internally in some scientific institute.
Actually, I'm not seeing anything about presenting this system as their own work. The book chapter linked off the top post on Habr talks about testing new image processing algorithms on the PERICOLOR hardware. The translation of the UI was most likely a simple hex-edit, and was done for usability.
Those pictures are from either different photos or different frames in a video. Do you have a link to the webpage discussing them? I realise it may not be possible to present the same frame with Lenin and without, but knowing whether they were taken several minutes or seconds apart would be useful in understanding the power of the tools the were using.
If anyone knows where I can find resources about the history of such machines, such as early reviews, screenshots or manuals – either of academic research prototypes or of commercial products – I’d really appreciate it.
I intend to sometime in the not-impossibly-distant future write detailed descriptions (beyond the level of any of the PS books or online resources I’ve seen) of all the tools in Photoshop, and some critiques/suggestions for improvement. A lot of the ideas seem traceable to 70s/80s research at PARC, NYIT, Stanford, etc., or to these early workstations like those made by Scitex, Tektronix, etc., but there’s not much material online about all of that history, so my knowledge of it is pretty sketchy.
[My email is in my profile, for anyone who has advice.]
One very early system was the Symbolics S-Graphics suite, which came out sometime in 1984. Its main strength was 3d graphics (actually either it or Wavefront was the first commercially sold 3d graphics system), but the Lisp Machine versions also came with 2d paint. When Symbolics went out of business the code was acquired by a Japanese company (Nichimen) and ported to Allegro Common Lisp on Irix and Windows NT (and later Linux) and sold branded as "Mirai" as a 3d graphics application (although the 2d paint part was still there in the form of an integrated texture painting tool).
Unfortunately the company basically folded sometime in 2003-2004ish timeframe - the last work done on Mirai as far as I know was on contract for Weta for Lord of the Rings (Mirai was used to animate Gollum's face; there's an interesting article about it on AWN: http://www.awn.com/articles/technology/two-towers-face-face-...). You can still buy a copy, but it's not under active development: http://www.izware.com/mirai/ (the texture painting tool is pretty cool: http://www.izware.com/mirai/paint.htm). When I have a spare million I'd like to buy the rights and release it as Free Software.
He started doing photo retouching in the 1950s. After he retired he went on to make some of the best photoshops I've ever seen. He was then in his 70s if I remember correctly. He made some posts about how they did it back then, so if there's a way to search deeply in worth1000s forum history it will be there. These posts were made in 2004-2005 I'd think.
Some of those "retouchings" near the end don't seem like they would be possible, even with today's technology. The bearded guy with with the cool hat goes from being very blurry to very sharp, with a lot of extra detail seemingly added out of nowhere (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2PsiJXswiM&t=02m27s).
Note: I have a hard time using MS Paint, let alone a modern image editing suite, so it's entirely likely that this magic is indeed possible, I'm just unaware of it.
As sister comment suggested, it's increasing the contrast. Normally, it would not make things look 'less blurry', but due to the way the image is being captured, the screen likely has higher dot pitch than recording medium their using, so low contrast areas blur together. As you increase the contrast, then they start to appear 'discrete'.
So you are saying that the practice of editing out "enemies of the state" still exists in former Soviet Union countries? How exactly do you envision this happening?
Not entirely unrelated, but during Milosevic's dictatorship here in Serbia, one of government-owned daily newspapers used PS to "slightly increase" number of supporters on a pro-government rally.
I know of one industry that is STILL using Dpaint to create graphics and animations for a certain type of dot-matrix display. It's crude, but nothing works as well. Also, they have a bunch of tools to read the LBM format and nobody is available to upgrade to newer stuff.
After more than 20 years, I still have rotary scanner envy.
In 1988, I spent several weeks trying to cobble together a prototype for capturing USGS topographic maps in color using a NewTek Digiview and an Amiga 2000.
Thanks, I wanted to know that! I thought I recognised the tune from a piece of dance music—I think it's the tune in Resurrection by PPK, who covered it according to wikipedia.
I wondered the same thing. Can anyone tell if that really was an Apple III or a clone or a coincidence? (I tried pausing in various places but it's inconclusive.)
It sure does look like an Apple III. It's not the US model because it has a >< key (in the modern Backspace location) where the US had a \| key. Actually probably German because it has the M key to the right of L. I'm pretty sure I see an Apple logo on the key to the left of the space bar at 1:38.
It's too close to the original to be a clone. I grew up with Apple clones (computers couldn't be imported to Brazil until my college years) and they all looked as different from Apple IIs they could while using the same parts.
Yes, I was about to comment on that and saw you'd spotted this too. Bonus points to you!
So the techno dance track is "PPK - Resurrection". One of my favorites tracks of all time until now.
I'm guessing that what we heard in the film is either a a traditional Russian song or a song from the late 80's -- either way it means that PPK ripped it off and didn't write that catchy hook themselves. I'm very sad to learn that.
Here is the discussion in Russian: http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/history/107465/