For the rest of the 1980s, Schewe's digital retouching was performed by partners on high-end systems such as Quantel Paintbox, which gave him his desired effects but was a slow process that cost hundreds of dollars an hour. Finally, in the early 1990s, desktop systems became powerful enough for Schewe to do the work himself. "Photoshop democratised digital imaging technology," he says. "I could have all the manipulation capability that these really high-end computer systems offered and I could do it myself. So I jumped into it with both feet."

In 1992, Schewe got an Apple Macintosh Quadra 950 equipped with a 1 GB hard drive, 256 MB of RAM, a 21-inch colour monitor, a SyQuest 44 cartridge drive, and Adobe Photoshop 2.0 — a then-state-of-the-art setup that cost more than $20,000. (That equipment has long been retired.) From the get-go, he has worked with large files — 150 MB or more — at true photographic resolution. He makes photos using Canon, Hasselblad, and Sinar view cameras and produces film that he scans into the computer using an Imacon Flextight II scanner.

"I prefer to shoot traditional films and process and scan files at the maximum optical resolution because I want the best quality that I can get," Schewe says. (That's why digital cameras are out of the picture, he says, until they can create larger files.) He performs colour correction in 16-bit RGB in Photoshop, then converts to 8-bit RGB for compositing and manipulation. "That way I'm starting with a perfect 8-bit image," he says. "I downsize the retouched file and the sized image looks seamless and perfect because I work at photographic resolution."

Schewe says his final composites also look pixel-perfect because of his downsizing method. "There's a trick to downsizing: Never throw away more than half of your pixels at once," he says. "If you take a 1,000-dpi image and downsample in a single operation to 72 dpi, then you lose whole chunks of pixels. To preserve texture and detail I downsample an image only 50 to 75 percent several times and apply intermediate unsharp masks or blurs. That way I have better control over the details."

Schewe provides clients with separated CMYK files, usually destined for national magazines, and uses Adobe Photoshop's colour management to proof and prepare images according to the colour capabilities of the final contract proof. He uses ICC profiles so that his monitors and his Epson Stylus Photo 1200 simulate a Matchprint, for example, and he views the final colour while working on a file and generating intermediate proofs. Then he provides clients with a real Matchprint (or Polaroid PolaProof, Kodak Approval or Fuji ColorArt or other halftone dot proof) in addition to the separated digital image. "What the art director and I see on the monitor is what we'll see on the proof. That's about all you can ask. Since I started doing that I've had very few problems," he says.

Because much of his work is repurposed by clients for the Web, Schewe also hands off a medium-resolution file (not JPEG) that clients can size further as needed. And since his clients want the Web and print versions of the image to be identical, he converts his final CMYK file back to RGB and gives that to them. "That limits the Web image to what's capable of being produced in CMYK, and that's too bad, but when a consistent look is important to the client, you have to make the Web image look like the print version," he says.

The history of History
Schewe became significantly involved with the development of Photoshop with the 4.0 upgrade, when he was brought in as an alpha tester. But it was with version 5.0 that Schewe really made his impact. Engineer Mark Hamburg, who'd been working on Photoshop since version 2.0, had been planning an Undo feature for the upgrade, and Schewe worked with him to make it into the more elegant and powerful History feature. "I feel particularly proud of the History feature," Schewe says. "It allows you to move forward in time and yet still access events in the past. It's a way of manipulating your data using multiple states."

Now Schewe is excited about Photoshop 6.0 for new features that both enhance the creative process and improve production — the Shapes vector-based layer, the capability to edit text directly, and the revamped colour management interface, for example. He recognises that Photoshop hasn't always been first at bat with breakthrough features (layers and multiple undo, for example, came out first in other applications), but that's not a problem, he says. "As an industry standard, Adobe has the responsibility to implement something well the first time round. You can implement a feature similar to how other people do it, or you can do it in such a way that aids and enhances the program's underlying technology and functionality, which is Adobe's approach."

Photoshop's underlying technology — its memory management and the mathematics it uses to handle raster data — has made it what it is today, Schewe says. "The reason Photoshop is the industry leader, used by so many people in so many industries, is that the same core functionality is useful for everyone. Other products haven't had that."

And Schewe sees no end in sight for the public's love of Photoshop, or for its leading role as an imaging application. "People will stop needing it when they stop needing pixels. You tell me when that's going to happen."