Tapestry's work winds up in big budget promotions for the likes of Texaco, the BBC and Channel 5. Now part of the Mullis Morgan group of repro and associated services companies, Tapestry was founded as a rapid turnaround photolab and conventional retouching house. Although traditional photographic services still play an important role at Tapestry's Soho premises, once you get past the light boxes and contact sheets on the ground floor, you're in a digital world. Large computer monitors glow softly in darkened rooms as highly skilled retouchers work the magic that their advertising clients demand of them. Whether it's giving a fashion model the perfect skin or polishing the gloss on the latest executive saloon car, it's all done digitally.
Digital image retouching is nothing new.
It's been going on for well over ten years. But what has changed recently at Tapestry is what they do it with. Until the summer of 1999, the Quantel Paintbox ruled supreme in Soho. With its combination of dedicated hardware and software it was able to offer a level of functionality and performance that met both the quality and productivity demands that Tapestry's clients expected. It was the expanding functionality of Adobe Photoshop, coupled with the increasing power of the Apple Macintosh that finally ended the reign of the Paintbox in Frith Street.