My first real job out of high school was as a grunt in the press room of a printing company. Big presses must establish the correct balance of ink on the paper before an actual press run. This process is called make-ready and requires the printing of hundreds of sheets of paper to reach the correct balance of ink for each project. In order to not waste paper, hundreds of previously printed "waste" sheets are reused many times. The overprinting of images produces some unusual and sometimes striking abstract art in the process.

 

Later, as a pressman, I found myself selecting and collecting some of these "runup" sheets, showing them to friends and family, and actually mounting and framing one of these “accidental art” sheets as artwork for my own wall. The color saturated random shapes was a very graphic art form of sorts. This simple accident attracted my attention to the drama of color and graphic design.

 

During this period of my life I became a big fan of Roy Lichtenstein, LeRoy Neiman, Pete Turner, and Andy Warhol for their bold use of color and graphic interpretation in their art. I was particularly impressed with Warhol's renderings of existing photographs as a genesis for his work. The fact that he used these photos to express very colorful and graphic interpretations of other people's photos gave me the idea that existing photographs could be further interpreted in creative ways by applying the stark line art lithographic process to the photographic development process.

Alius Origin and Artist Statement

Years later, I shifted from the press room to the pre-press department, operating a very large graphic arts camera. I learned to control contrast of images being prepared for press by varying several exposure processes. I then realized that all detail in pictures is controlled by the internal contrast of tones. I began experimenting with both exposure and development times of various films in an attempt to combine art with photography. In the process, I learned to control a bold process called posterization. Posterization is the crude process of representing the entire tonal range of a picture using only a handful of overprinted tones.

 

I experimented with this art form for several years in my own darkroom, eventually developing a detailed process that was so unique that I applied for a US patent. In the meantime I marketed this process to some large advertising agencies with reasonable success including a contract producing NFL program covers and a Time magazine cover. The process produced amazingly powerful images though I burned through extraordinary amounts of litho films in the process.

 

Then the personal computer appeared in the form of the Macintosh. I knew immediately that this machine would change the entire design and communications industry so I invested both time and money and got seriously involved with the software development process. Myself and another graphic designer combined ideas and eventually designed a software program for designers. We pitched the idea to Altsys, a Plano Texas based software developer. That idea resulted in an industry-changing graphic arts package called Aldus’ Freehand.

 

After producing the first printed four-color poster ever from a personal computer, my experience with color reproduction in the printing industry provided an opportunity to pitch another idea to a startup Silicon Valley developer named Adobe Systems then located in a strip mall.

 

I began consulting with Adobe on printed color picture reproduction; a lithographic process known as color separation. I later opened a software development company and Adobe licensed my small company as a Certified Adobe Developer and we began designing and developing software that added lithographic capabilities to their flagship software Photoshop.

 

 

Our software was called ScanPrep and it provided full automation to Photoshop users allowing them to produce magazine quality pictures without any prior photo knowledge. ScanPrep automated the whole scanning process and then automated all image processing totally under AI (artificial intelligence) controls. ScanPrep enjoyed considerable international success and won every conceivable award from both the digital publishing world and the printing industry.

 

At the same time, my lingering interest in producing high quality and  detailed pictures using my posterization process was still bubbling below the surface and looking for an outlet. While ScanPrep cycled through many years of product improvement, I contracted with a very sharp software engineer to translate my film-based posterization process into a fully operational software product. The code-name for this project was Alius, the Latin translation of the word English word "alias."

 

Alius went through many iterations of development but was never released to the public. That precision image interpretation software remains my own personal photo interpretation tool. The versatility of the software remains without equal in the graphics industry and now produces amazing graphic interpretations of digital photography. Alius is my own personal design tool set.

 

Alius images are razor sharp and can be scaled to virtually any size (think building) without any loss of definition or even hint of pixelation. My delight is to produce unique images from both my own photography and that of others in a form that simply cannot be replicated by any other art form. Alius is the perfect matrix between photography and artwork.

 

The interest that was sparked by runnup sheets of paper and accidental art in a press room fifty years ago has now become a valid art form.