[Ed in Tx]

One of my first jobs '71-'74 was working in a 4-color shop where we did all the color separating and correction work manually with film and chemicals. Was an interesting job but had long unpredictable hours which didn't jibe with a 23 year old (me). It's hard finding complete info on the old processes like how the first steps of the color separations are made with red green and blue filters which are the opposites of cyan magenta and yellow onto continuous tone panchromatic film sensitive to all visible light. Then the process where those separations are are converted to the halftone dots with a "screen" that came in various dot pitches 80, 100, 150, 200 dots per inch etc. The halftone film was not very sensitive to red light so we could use red safe lights in the contact room where we'd do that. Anyway got me to reminiscing! Just as I was leaving in 1974 the company had just purchased one of the first color transparency scanners. Big machine from Germany about 6 ft wide with a spinning cylinder you'd mount the color slide or transparency to and an optical head would move across it while it was spinning is about all I remember about it. We did everything from magazine ads and product packaging to the Neiman-Marcus Christmas catalog.