Barco Creator

Barco Creator was an image manipulation program targeted at the repro and print shop markets. It was developed by Barco Creative Systems a division of the Barco Group and first shown as a prototype at Parigraph in April 1988, then later at Ipex 88). Barco Creative Systems together with D. I. S. C. and Aesthedes merged into Barco Graphics. It ran on several generations of Silicon Graphics computers till the late 1990s. Barco Graphics (later Esko) ColorTone for Windows NT is considered its successor.

Until the late 1980s, digital retouching required specialized hardware such as the Quantel Paintbox. Barco Creator was one of the first products to run on off the shelf SGI workstations instead. Originally targeted at the "high end", Creator evolved into a slightly more mid market program with the "personal" edition running on the Indy. Still the price was in the $10k to $100k range depending on options, and additional hardware was sometimes needed to speed up specific operations. While Creator could rely on superior features and performance to justify its price through the mid 1990s, as time progressed each new Photoshop version made the Barco package harder to sell. After the release of version 7.1 in late 1997 there were few new sales. This was replaced in early 1993 with the more powerful "Chameleon" board, integrating the discrete logic of the Colcom board in a custom ASIC. Its main purpose was displaying CMYK colours on the (RGB) monitor quickly. After version 7.0 the Chameleon was also used for accelerating certain colour correction operations. For the release of Creator 6 Barco also added a Brush accelerator board that made retouching with large brushes on files of several hundred megabytes possible. Turnkey workstations were additionally supplied with a WACOM tablet, a Barco Reference Calibrator self calibrating or Personal Calibrator monitor and SCSI RAID storage, though stripped down versions were also available. Input was usually from high end scanners: Linotype Hell, Crosfield Electronics, Dainippon Screen, or ICG (Itek Color Graphics). From the Indigo/Crimson versions the Howtek D4000 (4000dpi) drum scanner was usually offered as an option. Version 7 supported both the D4000 and the D7500 (5000dpi) scanner.

Barco Creator was discontinued in the late 1990s, and was not picked up by Purup Eskofot after it purchased the Graphics division of Barco. Neither Barco nor Esko have the ability to issue new licenses anymore. As Creator was only available in single nodelocked licenses, one would need to buy an original system with the license included to have a "full legal version".