In February 2010 Adobe Photoshop celebrated its 20th anniversary. Over the past 20 years, the program has become an indispensable tool for amateur and professional designers, hobbyists and artists alike.
The program was first developed in the autumn of 1987, when Thomas Knoll, a PhD student wrote a program to display images in varying shades of grey (greyscale). He was using a black-and-white monitor, (it was 1987 after all!) and a Mac Plus computer.
Meanwhile his brother John was working for George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic Company, (which happened to do the visual effects for the Star Wars films). Realising the program’s potential, John encouraged his brother to continue working on expanding the program. Together they bought a Macintosh II with a colour screen and set to work on creating a photo editing suite which was named and re-named many times before the brothers decided on ‘Photoshop’.
Adobe signed a licence to distribute the program in 1988. The Knolls signed a royalties deal which has, over the years, made them very wealthy.
However, the Photoshop story wasn’t all plain sailing. The program got off to a rocky start when Photoshop 1.0 was launched in 1990, selling only 200 copies! In spite of this, the potential of the application was obvious- the software has consistently been one of the most pirated computer programs.
Since the late 1980s, Photoshop has become the industry standard application for creating and editing photographic images, with millions of dedicated user across the design, media and information technology sectors.
The influence and market penetration of Photoshop is enormous. Virtually every image that we see online or in print has been digitally optimised or altered, the vast majority using Photoshop. The program has become so pervasive in the workplace that few working in creative industries can imagine a working day without the program. In fact, its very name has become a common verb- ‘photoshopping’ predates the phenomenon ‘google it’, much to Adobe’s chagrin.
One reason for the success of the program is inclusivity- amateur photographers and designers are able to produce professional quality images with relatively little knowledge of the program and fairly quickly. However, don’t be fooled into thinking that Photoshop is, in any way basic. Watching the program running on a computer has been compared to viewing the cockpit of a Boeing 747 –and it can take just as long to master!
It’s estimated that even most professional designers use only 20% of the functions available with the program, and of those, they can get by using only 5-10%.
Over the 20 years we’ve been using Photoshop, the company has launched 13 versions, each surpassing all expectations- perhaps the only addition Adobe could make is a visual spellchecker as even the most practiced eye can make mistakes!
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