Here’s a video of Rolf Harris “demonstrating” an image editing program on Good Morning Britain in 1984. I’m not sure what the program is, I don’t think it is actually Photoshop, but the computer looks a bit like a Commodore 64. Rolf doesn’t seem 100% sure of what he’s doing. I like how’s he using a joystick for drawing though. Around 2 minutes in, the presenter in the matching yellow trousers and jacket asks “do you think this is a serious art form?” Some people are still asking that question today.

At the Irish Web Awards on Saturday, one of the winners was Pixenate. This is a great little site which offers online image editing. I’m not going to pretend that it replaces Photoshop (of which I am a die-hard to the point of being anal, fan), but that’s not what it’s supposed to be.

The site is simplicity itself with some nice clean icons on the left hand side and the image that you want to edit in the centre of the page. The tools allow you to do all the usual stuff like rotate, crop, remove red eye, go sepia, but there are also some nice little “fun effects” like oil painting, andywarholing and lomo.

The site is light and fast and allows you to either save your image to a drive or to upload directly to Flickr. Well worth a visit.