Directory:20 Years of Photoshop
Without Adobe Photoshop, the Internet will be completely different than what we are seeing today. This earth shaking graphics designing and editing computer software is developed and published by Adobe Systems. The 11th major version of Adobe Photoshop – Adobe Photoshop CS4 – just released 7 months ago, while, in fact, Photoshop has continuously existed and evolved for more than 20 years.
Adobe published an official brief review of 20 years of Photoshop history, however, there are much more facts about Photoshop’s history are worth to highlight.
Photoshop's most recent logo
Infant Stage
In 1987, Thomas Knoll, the son of a professor, began developing a program, called Display, to display grayscale images on his Macintosh Plus. His brother John Knoll who worked for Industrial Light & Magic quickly realized the commercial potential of Display, and recommended Thomas to turn it into a full-fledged image editing program. Thomas worked on the program and renamed it Photoshop in 1988. They then began to distribute copies of the program with a slide scanner. But Photoshop was not well known until John met Russell Brown, art director at Adobe. Soon Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute in September 1988.
In 1990, Photoshop 1.0 was released for Macintosh exclusively.
The original application icons designed by John Knoll.
Teenage
Started from 1990, Photoshop updated its versions in a relatively fast pace. With interesting codenames for different versions, such as Fast Eddy, Brimstone, Big Electric Cat, and Venus in Furs, Photoshop went all the way from version 1.0 to 7.0. In August 2002, Photoshop released version 7.0.1. Many significant features were developed during this time, including Paths(2.0), Layers(3.0), Color Management(5.0), and Healing Brush(7.0).
In less than a decade, Photoshop became an important member of Adobe software family. It was not only a famous computer software brand, but also a standard tool for graphic editing, web designing, media editing, and more.
Adobe Photoshop 7.0
Interesting Facts
- Photoshop was available for Windows operating system in November 1992, after seeing Windows' continuously increasing popularity. Photoshop was at version 2.5 with codename Brimstone at that time.
- However, one of the current major competitor of Photoshop is Silverlight, a graphic editing program belong to Microsoft software family.
