Photoshop has been a part of every web designer’s life since they picked up their first mouse.
On February 10th, 2010, Photoshop turns twenty. To mark this anniversary, we’ve come up with an article that takes you through the evolution of Photoshop from its modest beginnings as a bundled program sold with scanners to its current version.
For each version and major feature listed, we couldn’t help but think “did Photoshop ever exist without that feature?”.
Some of the minor details are fun too, such as the one-liner Easter Eggs that Photoshop developers hid in some versions and the fact that the most current versions of Adobe Photoshop CS are equipped with anti-counterfeiting measures for multiple world currencies.
Please join us in thanking the Knolls and Adobe for making all of our lives more awesome, every day.
Photoshop: Origins
One of the most impressive things about the company is the fact that one gifted family, consisting of an engineering prof, a PHD engineering student, and a talented special effects whiz working at Industrial Light and Magic came up with the core idea of Photoshop.
Thomas Knoll, the PHD student, is still heavily involved with Photoshop years later.
Glen Knoll was a college professor with two sons and two hobbies; computers and photography.
He had a darkroom in his basement, and an Apple II Plus that he was allowed to bring home from work.
Thomas Knoll adopted his father’s photography habit throughout high school, while his brother, John Knoll, purchased one of the first Macs available to the public.
Fast forward to 1987: Thomas Knoll was a PHD student studying Engineering at the University of Michigan. His brother was working at Industrial Light and Magic.
Thomas Knoll wrote a subroutine for a program to translate monochrome images on his monitor to grayscale.
The successful subroutine led Knoll to create more and very soon he had a number of processes for achieving photographic effects on digital images.
After his brother John saw what Thomas was doing, he recommended that Thomas turn what he was doing into a full-featured image editor.
The combination of Thomas’ programming abilities with John’s pragmatic design background led to a collaboration between the two brothers to develop more processes and improve on the initial application.
Even though the process led to interruption in Thomas’ thesis work, the brothers released “Image Pro” in 1988.
John suggested that they begin to sell Image Pro as an application.
Within six months, the brothers had a partnership with a company that manufactured scanners, Barneyscan.
They purchased 200 copies of the program to ship with their scanners.
They called on Supermac and Aldus, but were turned away at both, a move that Aldus would come to seriously regret.
Shortly after, the Knoll brothers struck gold when they won over Adobe management with their product, and formed a licensing partnership with Adobe that was to launch their software and Adobe into the stratosphere.
In February of 1990, Adobe 1.0 was released.
This video, shot in January of 2010, is a great interview with John Knoll about the early days of Photoshop:
Photoshop Through the Years; Version Changes
We’ve included major changes within each version and some minor ones. This is meant to be a fun stroll down memory lane rather than a complete version catalogue.
If you have a particular version change that got your hackles up or a feature that you’d to mention, feel free to add it to the comments section.
Adobe Photoshop, my favorite utility for manipulating existing images and passing them off as original work, just turned 20 years old. It’s a rare distinction when a product or company name is so ubiquitous that it becomes a verb. Google, Photoshop, and Netflix are the three that come to mind. I can’t think of others off the top of my head, so comment if I’m missing any.
I started learning Photoshop in high school, although my computer back then was so slow that just applying a filter meant it was time for a soda break. I got more heavily into it in college when I started working with video and designing flyers for bands. Fark.com’s Photoshop contestswere a fun place to practice and see what other people could do. If you haven’t seen these before, Fark.com periodically offers up an image and lets readers hack away at it and post their “improved” versions. As the contest threads grow in length, readers tend to build on ideas, and you’ll often see multiple variations on the same joke. The quality of editing varies wildly, so Fark enables voting for reader favorites. This was the starting image for one recent contest (full thread of submissions here):
Learning Photoshop is like picking up a musical instrument in that it takes minutes to understand the basics, but years of practice to master. When someone says, “I know how to use Photoshop,” it’s as vague a statement as “I know how to play guitar.” Most people who know the basic chords on a guitar can’t improvise a jazz solo over a 5/4 time signature. This is why I know better than to call myself an expert Photoshopper. After 10+ years of casual editing, I’m proficient, but the more I work with it, the more I realize I have to learn. For me, Photoshop has always been a supplemental tool for other creative pursuits.