A Proven Visual Communications Partner with European Presence.
Firehouse News
Introducing Firehouse Europe!
Firehouse is very excited to announce the opening of our production facility in Europe. Open since April, Firehouse BV is located in beautiful Venray in the Netherlands. Our 10,000 sq. ft. facility is equipped with two double speed Lambda photo printers, an array of Epson inkjets and laminating and finishing capabilities. Firehouse BV is uniquely positioned to deliver on-time to the European market. Amsterdam, Berlin, Zurich, Paris and London are all within immediate reach.
We foresee huge growth opportunities in executing in-store campaigns for our US partners that also have a European presence. Eliminate the pain of global color calibration, communication, billing, etc. One vendor for coordinated graphics in the US and the EU. Our expansion plans in 2012 will be influenced by client consultations currently in progress. Let us hear from you. We want to tailor this facility to meet your needs now and in the future.GlobalShop 2011!
Firehouse's sales team has returned from GlobalShop 2011. What is GlobalShop? Their website says it best, "GlobalShop is the world's largest annual tradeshow and conference dedicated to store design, visual merchandising, and shopper marketing. It is the only place where retailers and brand marketers can visit over 600 suppliers in one location."As always we were pleased to see friends and make new acquaintances. While attendance seemed lighter than previous years, the crowd was very enthusiastic. New products have always dominated discussions in years past, but the big topic in 2011 is SPEED! Clients are asking for the fastest on-demand printing solutions and Firehouse is poised to deliver with new equipment announcements on the horizon. And our new production facility in the Netherlands uniquely positions Firehouse to service the European market with the speed today's jobs demand.
We all look forward to the annual trek to Las Vegas and we will definitely be back in 2012. Hope to see you there.
Firehouse Certified as a Women's Business Enterprise
Firehouse is proud to announce we have completed the Indiana State Certification process as a Woman-owned Business Enterprise.
It's been a long road to certification, but realizing the goal was worth the wait," said Firehouse President Sally Corman. When asked what the certification will mean to her business, Corman says, "When I became Firehouse President over ten years ago, we did not initially pursue WBE certification. However, our clients urged us to begin the process. We look forward to better serving them in meeting their diversity spending goals. But there are further benefits than just focusing on the bottom line. We are now part of something bigger. It's about recognizing Firehouse's hard work and dedication to its clients."Firehouse CEO Terry Corman asked his wife Sally to join the company shortly after he purchased the business in 1989. He needed someone to manage the day-to-day business details. Sally became Firehouse President in 2001 and continues to evolve the company into one of the leading graphics providers on the planet.
Happy Birthday Photoshop
I was going through old archive CDs the other day in preparation to consolidate everything onto new DVDs. I stumbled on an old applications folder from 15 years ago and a version of Photoshop 3 caught my eye. I wonder. I have an older Mac that can still run in Classic mode. Would this 15-year-old software still run? Pop in the disk, double-click and it's like I'm in a time machine.
It opens surprisingly fast! It's certainly more simplistic than it's older brother, but Photoshop 3 (released in late 1994) was possibly the most ground-breaking version ever. But more on that later. It's hard to believe it's really been 20 years since Photoshop debuted and quickly dominated the image editing market.It began in 1987 actually. Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, was writing subroutines to display grayscale image levels on his Mac Plus's monochrome monitor. His brother John became intrigued due to his own interest in image processing at special effects house Industrial Light and Magic. He recommended Thomas expand the project into an image editing program and include color editing. Thomas eagerly took his advice and continued adding features as John requested them.
The little app was initially named Display and later ImagePro. John was convinced they could turn their project into a commercial venture and began gauging interest around Silicon Valley. In 1988, BarneyScan offered to bundle the application (now named Photoshop) with its slide scanner. About 200 copies of Photoshop were sold with the scanners. In late 1988, John presented a demo of Photoshop to Adobe and a legend was born. After many months of development, Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990.
Firehouse was an early adopter and I still recall my initial Photoshop experiments that summer on our first Mac. At that time, we had no practical application for the software. Compositing images and text was all done by hand in the darkroom. A complex process which took hours. And, if there was a mistake, many more hours. I vividly recall a conversation with Firehouse CEO Terry Corman in late 1990. He told me some day I'd just be sitting in front of a Mac to do my job and the stat cameras, darkrooms and photo enlargers would all be obsolete. It sounded like science fiction. And it happened even faster that any of us could have predicted.
Within a year, Macs had replaced our antiquated slide production system. Film recorders replaced darkrooms and then photo printers replaced film recorders.
But back to Photoshop. Version 2 was released in 1991 and opened up the software to print professionals by adding support for CMYK files. It also introduced bezier curves and the pen tool. No more lasso selections! Version 2 began the tradition of assigning code names to each major release. Version 2 was known as Fast Eddy. For an amusing look at the various code names and alternate splash screens, Click Here.Windows users received their first Photoshop with the cross-platform release of version 2.5. Significant in Firehouse's history, the minor update in Photoshop 2.5.1 included a plugin for Photo CD support. Firehouse was the premier Photo CD creator in the state and this little plugin made Photo CD scans accessible beyond the TV screen. And now back to version 3 and the most ground-breaking introduction in Photoshop history!
Photoshop 3 introduced layers! That changed everything. Prior to layers, compositing images required pre-planning. Once you pasted an element into a file and deselected it, it was there. You could undo and adjust, but once you moved on, there was no going back. Everything was part of a single, flattened layer. Designers took to saving numerous versions of their files in different states to have a fall-back position if necessary. Layers changed all that by allowing element isolation and endless adjustment.
Nothing since has quite equalled the game-changing introduction of layers, but Photoshop has never rested on its laurels. Photoshop 4 allowed even more flexibility by introducing adjustment layers. Redundant tasks could also be automated through the new macros feature named Actions. Photoshop 5 gave us editable text, color management and the History pallette. Version 6 gave us vector shapes and new filters. Version 7 introduced the healing brush and support for the Camera RAW format. Versions 8, 9 and 10 brought numerous little tweaks to image filtering, format support and interface modifications. That takes us up to Photoshop version 11 (part of Adobe Creative Suite 4) which added auto-blending, masking improvements, better color correction and the Adjustments panel. And, as of this writing, Photoshop 12 is on the horizon with the release of Creative Suite 5.
It just doesn't seem possible that 20 years have come and gone since Photoshop entered the world and was years ahead of Google in having its name become a verb. So the next time the boss asks you to "Photoshop" something, send a good thought to the Knoll brothers who made it all possible.