2012 Digitally Enhanced Atoms

[Steve]

Let your PhotoShop skillz be known! This is the only category in which modified, edited, or otherwise enhanced photos are allowed.

[Norm]

My wife thinks this is "creepy", I just like to think I have Atom's on my mind ....

[Norm]

and another to get things started

[Gage]

If I had any skills I would use them here. However, I am great at spec ta tating.

[Norm]

Common Gage, do an Atom running some 24"s, gold rims and velvet Recaro's

[Norm]

[wattie]

My wife thinks this is "creepy", I just like to think I have Atom's on my mind ....

Noticed this on the other sight Norm. You are the king of techeffects, great avatar, pic etc...skills and respect.

Cheers Wattie

[Norm]

Thanks Wattie! I tried a new technique to me that converts pictures to number strings. The individual frames don't look that good, but, run as a movie they have amazing detail.

[Terry Kennedy]

Thanks Wattie! I tried a new technique to me that converts pictures to number strings. The individual frames don't look that good, but, run as a movie they have amazing detail.

Way back in the Paleozoic era (1976-ish), the first computer program that I wrote for real money used a PDP-8 and a video camera to take a picture and convert it to a series of characters and print it out on a modified (for reduced line spacing) Centronics lineprinter with overprinting to produce 16 shades of gray. The very first image captured and printed that way was a wallet photo of my then-girlfriend. The second image was of the famous Farrah Fawcett poster.

The company leased those systems to people who had kiosks in shopping malls. Apparently it was also possible to buy one, though at $20K-ish (in 1970's money) nobody bought one (that I know of). People would pay a couple bucks to sit in front of a camera and have their picture taken "by computer" and printed out on paper or printed and then transferred to a T-shirt by ironing the special paper onto the shirt. Since none of the operators wanted to take the time to change the paper, most of these printouts have faded to unreadability (the thermal transfer paper wasn't the most stable stuff).

About 6 months after the system with my software came out, a competitor came out with a similar system that used a much cheaper computer (a Datapoint 1500) and a printer with a custom character ROM (so you couldn't see the individual letters), and the company that leased the original systems went bust.

In an amusing twist of fate, some years later I wound up consulting for Datapoint as part of the software design for the 1550 that replaced the 1500.

[RandyLamp]

Not the first appearance of this photo, but it does fit the category. The car was photographed in my shop.