Photoshop was initially designed as a tool used for retouching photographs digitally. But the current incarnation of this powerful program can be used for so much more! In addition to photo editing, Photoshop is also utilized:
- by graphic designers to design logos and icons.
- by commercial illustrators to create graphics for magazines and other works.
- by web designers to plan and build a structured visual layout for web pages.
- by digital artists to paint sensational and intricate digital works of art.
- by animators to lay out keyframes and build initial framework animations.
- by modelers to work in both 2D and 3D environments at the same time.
- by hobbyists to mess around with stuff.
But it is a bit hard to imagine how this wonderfully complex piece of software came from an individual programming project. That is how Photoshop began, though; a personal programming project of Thomas Knoll, who was a PHD student who was studying at the University of Michigan in 1987. At the time, while he was studying engineering, his brother John Knoll was working at Industrial Light and Magic. Thomas Knoll successfully wrote a small program on his Macintosh Apple II Plus which allowed the computer to translate grayscale images for display on a monochrome screen. When Thomas demonstrated his work to his brother John, the latter encouraged the former to continue the small project into a fully-featured image editing program (West, 2010).
The initial result was a program released in 1988 called "Image Pro", which simulated simple photo-retouching effects on images that were scanned into the computer. They made their first market break with a partnership with Barneyscan, a company that manufactured photo scanners; the company bought 200 copies of their program to ship with their products. Although the partnership with Barneyscan could be considered a success, the Knolls had bigger ambitions and continued to seek support from other companies (West, 2010).
After being turned away by Supermac and Aldus, the Knolls caught the attention of Adobe management, who offered them a licensing partnership. Under this new partnership the brothers, with Adobe, launched Adobe Photoshop 1.0 in February of 1990 (Schewe, 2000). From here, Adobe and the Knoll brothers developed the Photoshop series of raster image editing software for over twenty years, releasing thirteen stable generations of the creative industry staple, and are still actively developing.
I'll save the evolution of Photoshop itself for another time, though. Today is just about how it all began.
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- West, Angela. (2010). 20 Years of Adobe Photoshop. Webdesigner Depot. Retrieved from http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/02/20-years-of-adobe-photoshop/
- Schewe, Jeff. (2000). 10 Years of Photoshop: The Birth of a Killer Application. Design by Fire. Retrieved from http://www.designbyfire.com/pdfs/history_of_photoshop.pdf (pdf document)
