All that steampunk stuff is so childish compared to this Soviet photo editing tool from 1987. It's pure analogue goodness. This video reminds us of a time before Photoshop became mainstream — it makes us really miss the imaginative minds of yesteryear.

Just look at this thing. This Soviet invention used a rotary scanner, magnetic tape and a trackball to manipulate photos. Oh film, how we miss thee. We miss the dark rooms too. There's no doubt that this machine was probably used to prepare Soviet propaganda to brainwash everyone. Maybe the Soviets never even had all those tanks and they were all inflatable ones all along.

It kind of scares us to stumble upon this video — it has us thinking, how much of what we see in photographs of the olden days is real? Photographers have always used ways to manipulate photos with various dodging and burning techniques inside the dark room. So how accurate is photographic history?

Boing Boing, via Petapixel