Medieval Photoshop | Hacker News Reader

Medieval Photoshop

leidenmedievalistsblog.nl

171 pointsdanso42 comments

The last time I was at a museum I learned that some medieval painters would create "templates" of a sort where the majority of the painting would be complete except the face. They'd travel around and if you bought the painting they'd fill it in with your face. It makes a lot of sense, but was a level of automation and customization I hadn't considered.

Not just medieval. that practice continued in the 1800s, up until photography. The rich would hire a painter to do everything, but those with less wealth - or the more frugal rich - would hire a painter to just do the face and hands. Hands are important, not just the face. Everything else about the body is covered by clothing (notice long sleeves - avoids having to paint the arms), and so can be done in a more convenient location. I wouldn't be surprised if the practice predates writing as is is really obvious and some people have more a talent for painting.

In Iowa painters would spend all winter (when snow made it hard to get around) painting bodies. then in summer when getting around was easy they would travel around, whenever someone hired them for a picture they would select a pre-painted portrait and add the face and hands. In the Iowa governors mansion there is such a picture where the guides point out the the boy in some picture was holding a club (probably for croquette) in an impossible way because the club was already in the picture. (the picture is from the second owner of the mansion, long before the state bought it)

It is in use also today in turists destinations. Put your face through a hole in a wall painted with something (body of an animal for example), get a picture.

Do you have any sources where I can read more about this practice?

All the way back to the Romans, the statues had detachable heads so that one ruler or governor's head could be replaced by the next.

The actual governors had detachable heads, too.

On along enough timeline everyone has a detachable head.

Did they care about different body types? Or could you end up with Trump's head on Obama's torso?

I've seen a few of those paintings. Some were of children's faces on grown-up bodies.

I mean have you seen some of the Trump fanart?

The YouTube channel Shadiversity has a series called 'Medieval Misconceptions' which I really enjoy: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWklwxMTl4sx73IrJ4PPUJmul...

The overarching theme of this series is that medieval people were not dumb, they just had different cultures and less technology. The more I learn about it the more I come to appreciate this idea.

Of course if drawing images was expensive and difficult, someone would find a way to make copies and edits of existing images! It's what any of us would do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology has a long list of things that we might ascribe to either the Romans or to the late Renaissance but are firmly in the misnamed "Dark ages".

There’s a childrens show called “Horrible Histories” that tried to make history “fun” for kids. They continually indicate that people in the past were very stupid and brutal. Horrible history show.

> There’s a childrens show called “Horrible Histories” that tried to make history “fun” for kids. They continually indicate that people in the past were very stupid and brutal. Horrible history show.

But people were (and continue to be) stupid and brutal. If anything, the Horrible Histories series whitewashes and plays down many of the actual stupid brutalities, so as to make the history child-friendly. But there are events like cat burnings in European history up to the 1800s, where people would gather in the town square and set giant bags of cats on fire [1].

The edition of Horrible Histories that comes out in the year 2100 about the 21st century is going to describe the most stupid and brutal period yet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat-burning

This is a great example of a "Hacker" News article, revealing true hacker tricks.

A bunch more really great articles along these lines here: https://medievalbooks.nl/

A favorite: https://medievalbooks.nl/2018/09/20/me-myself-and-i/

Thank you, great page and article!

Back in medieval times, monasteries full of monks would painstakingly create copies of books by hand, letter by letter. In the late medieval period, Xerox ran a commercial showing a Xerox machine being delivered to a monastery, followed by a monk raising his eyes upwards in thanks as the machine cranked out perfect copies.

Which is especially funny if you know that Xeros copiers do not actually create perfect copies, because they compress to jbig2 internally and thereby introduce lossy compression artifacts such as O to 0 replacements.

That ad predated jpg. I don't think those 70's Xerox machines did any digitization.

Sounds more like medieval clip-art than Photoshop.

Clip-art! This explains why medieval art had weird proportions and perspectives everywhere, they were medieval power-point slides. :)

It wasn't all that long ago that cut-and-paste literally meant cut with scissors and paste with glue.

It certainly seems barbaric today.

For me the first version of photo editing happened in Russia. Enemies of Stalin were erased from photos and from Russian history.

Copy pasting images is kind of different. Photocopies have been part of the comic book trade way before using computers. I see these techniques closer to it.

- https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-photo-book...

Not directly related but... I had to service a Windows 10 computer yesterday. It had Adobe Acrobat Reader DC installed. The computer was extremely slow (i3, 4 GB, non-SSD) thanks to the combination of system and software installed. Not that the software is that different from what many end-users would have: lenovo-problemware, norton, msoffice and a synaptics tool.

Some of the processes taking memory, processor and disk were multiple instancies RdrCEF.exe, AcroCEF.exe and Acrobat Reader DC itself. And there wasn't any PDF open!

Because of what Adobe turned out, and I'm not even talking about licenses here, it would be a favor to humanity if we try to undo "photoshop" as a synonym for image editing.

As for naming, this has happened many times, you can see examples like Xerox, Kleenex, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark

I noticed in the UK it is much more common. You can see it in terms like hoovering, sellotape, tipex, and biro.

Never thought I'd see the day I post a quora but here we are! https://www.quora.com/Why-do-the-British-use-the-word-hoover...

What's odd is that, being a Brit in the UK I often use these generic trademarks out of habit. But, sometimes when I say Hoover here in the USA people get what I mean. So it must have had an effect over here, but smaller?

Hoover was a dominant brand in the US, but never fully generalized. So when you say hoover, many people in the US (especially when used in context, like "I need to hoover the carpet") will probably get what you are saying. My wife refers to "Lysoling" the counters, which isn't standard usage (and we usually use generic target brands anyway) but plenty of people we know get what she means.

Generic verb "hoover" is probably used more in the US as a deliberately informal/colloquial synonym to ingest or something like that. e.g. hoover up all your data.

That probably has as much to do with J Edgar Hoover as it does with the Hoover vacuum cleaner company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover

It's not just in the UK. I heard an obstetrician refer to the "hoover maneuver" whereby suction was used to help deliver the baby.

But there are more in the US section than in the UK. I also noticed that in America you use brand names for a lot of medicines rather than the 'real' names.

Just a cultural thing I guess.

> it would be a favor to humanity if we try to undo "photoshop" as a synonym for image editing

Well it's already common vernacular that won't go away any time soon. Many people including myself have old versions of PS installed on some dusty machine and it does its job well. It's now impossible to get free/cracked versions of the latest PS because it's all cloud based now, but there is a large cohort of people using older versions.

> It's now impossible to get free/cracked versions of the latest PS because it's all cloud based now, but there is a large cohort of people using older versions.

That's objectively not true – I understand that there are a lot of cracked versions of the creative suite out there - perhaps a few months behind the latest release, but certainly not by much.

As ever, this is the problem that makes me hate DRM: paying customers get a worse product. I have a legal license of CS6 and I am writing this comment on a Mac running 10.14 partly as a consequence (it is the last version of the OS to run 32 bit apps -- of which I have a fair few). I will not take out a subscription to Adobe to get a newer version -- I just will not do it. If I pirated everything, I'd be in a much "better position" in many ways.

> I understand that there are a lot of cracked versions of the creative suite out there

I haven't looked, but it's my understanding that you need an ADOBE login that you use to interact with Creative Suite, so by 'cloud based' I mean the software is all Internet facing now. There are probably workarounds for that in the warez scene however.

> this is the problem that makes me hate DRM: paying customers get a worse product

Substitute the word “piracy” in place of DRM, and you’re closer to the cause.

(Though I’d definitely concede that a lot of heavy-handed DRM and cloud-only is less about reducing “piracy” and more about controlling customers and enabling rent-seeking on a massive scale.)

I don't quite understand what's being copied/reused here. Is it stamps being used to make copies of something?

I didn’t read all of it but they do talk a bit about woodcuts. That was a hobby of mine for a while. It’s where you carve a “stamp” into a piece of wood.

They were cutting up printed images and pasting them together, in a process commonly known as “collage”.

Was the final manuscript glued together then? If so, this whole article seems off-point. Why not just say "this old manuscript has images made up of several layers, it looks like collage"?

I was assuming this college technique was used to make a (plan for a) new woodcutting.

Edit:college -> collage

Yeah the decision to never say “collage” even once is a strange one. It looks like the glued-up piece is the final manuscript to me.

How Warhol of them

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