From its humble beginnings on a grad student’s Mac Plus to its complete photo-editing domination, Photoshop has changed the world in 20 short years. Photoshop is everywhere. And while fundamentally it is the standard professional-quality image editor, it’s also a cultural touchstone with a reach that extends to advertising, fashion magazines, television, film, and the news. Lighter versions like Photoshop Elements, Photoshop.com, and even Photoshop Mobile on the iPhone have distilled its power for the masses, and sites like PhotoshopDisasters.blogspot.com chronicle painful misuses for everyone to point at and giggle about. “Photoshop” the verb was even added to Webster’s dictionary in 1992. In such a Photoshop-saturated society, it’s easy to forget that the software hasn’t been around forever. Since February 2010 marks the 20th anniversary of Photoshop 1.0, now is the perfect time to revisit everything from Adobe’s systematic dismantling of its competition to the way the software was used to make Katie Couric “lose weight.” Two Decades of Photoshop We give you every single Photoshop release, plus the effects of Adobe’s software on its competition and our culture. 1987 Release: Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, creates a program called Display for his Mac Plus. It can display 256-shade grayscale images on a 1-bit black-and-white screen with dithering. 1988 Release: Display is renamed Photoshop, and the Knoll brothers (Thomas and John, an effects expert at Industrial Light & Magic [ILM]) license the first version to Barneyscan, a slide-scanner manufacturer. Approximately 200 copies of version 0.87 ship bundled with the scanners. Cultural: The first working version of Photoshop appears at Apple, and the era of Photoshop piracy begins as engineers pass it around amongst themselves and gape in awe. 1989 Release: John Knoll demos Photoshop for Adobe’s primary art director Russell Brown and founder John Warnock
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20 Years of Image Editing: Photoshop from 1.0 to CS4
