Photoshop
I'm not real fond of this question, so let's rephrase it into a similar one that's better:
How has the availability of affordable, high-quality digitized imagery impacted digital graphic design? Executive summary: Affordable digitized photos have made it possible for more publishers to use more photos and more color than ever before, which enables them to attract more readers. First, let me tell you about the really old days--back in the 1960s. If you wanted to print a photo in your magazine (forget "newsletters"--those never had any pictures) and you just wanted black & white, you took a picture of it through a "halftone screen" onto Photo Mechanical Transfer paper. The screen broke the photo into dots of various sizes, which made it printable on press. You pasted the PMT onto an artboard and shot the board on the same camera. Then you stripped the negative into a flat and made a plate from it. If you wanted color photos, you shot the photo four times with different screens and different filters in front of the lens, then stripped those negatives into your layout flats. Color was something you only did every once in a while--the cover and maybe two or three pictures inside. And newspapers NEVER ran color photos, except in the special "Rotogravure section" on Sunday. (Ask me later what rotogravure was.) Forward to the late 1970s. There were two ways to do a color photo. The first was to use a drum scanner--a very large machine--to create the separations. The other was to use an image editing workstation like a Scitex or a Hell. Either way you're looking at somewhere between half a million and a million and a half to buy the equipment, and you need a lot of training to use it. It was far easier to make separations, and the seps were better, but it still cost too much to throw a ton of color photos on a page. Now? It's so simple to put tons of photos on a page, everyone does it. The pages look a lot better than they did in the old times. They're prettier. Now here's the flipside: very few people, outside New York and Los Angeles, actually care about what they're putting out, as far as quality goes. Everyone thinks you can fix anything in
Photoshop, so you get pictures that are blatantly awful. Now, we get pictures of the company's CEO in a wrinkled suit with a huge shiny spot on his forehead. Thirty years ago, he wore a freshly-pressed suit to the photo shoot and his secretary put a little makeup on him before he went in front of the camera. The difference was night and day. Do I want to go back to the old days? In a way, yes. If I could get the nice professional-looking photos we used to see, but not have to strip flats together by hand, I'd be a happy camper.
