We had to scan all those images, select a small set that would work, color-correct them and assemble them into a single file, apply the Spherize filter to that, cut up the image, and finally layer Ted Turner underneath it. A staff instructor put in dozens of hours alongside Heisler, scanning and cleaning up images in Photoshop. As days passed, and the art director in New York started to get antsy, I pitched in, bringing in extra computers and 500MB hard drives, and sitting vigil as Photoshop churned and churned and sometimes crashed. The cover ultimately shipped on time.

Photoshop wasn't the only digital imaging app used at the center. , then owned by , was the main alternative. It offered channels, layers, and a kind of programming language for combining effects. Some of the center's instructors swore by it and thought of Photoshop as a kind of also-ran. ColorStudio originally cost $2000, compared to about $900 for Photoshop at the time.

But Photoshop had two advantages of its own. For one thing, it supported plug-ins that could provide features that were missing in the core program. More importantly, with just a little training, mere mortals could work with it. ColorStudio, by contrast, required full immersion.

Photoshop won that battle and over the subsequent 20-plus years kept winning the war. In that time, I've used every release. I used it to edit photos and figures for countless articles and books. The latter included three editions of , a book about the process of working with images from analog to digital and back again onto press. That topic became superannuated as the publishing industry shifted from imagesetting in service bureaus (using bluelines and color proofs for prepress checks) to plate-setting in printing plants (using PDFs instead).