Adobe Systems' Photoshop
graphics editing software has hit the 20-year mark.
Adobe Photoshop turned 20 on Feb. 19 and is still going strong. In a news
release the previous day, the company said:
"The National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) will be hosting
a special Photoshop 20th Anniversary celebration for over a thousand attendees
in San Francisco at the Palace of
the Fine Arts Theater today. The event will feature Adobe's senior vice
president of Creative Solutions, John Loiacono, as well as vice president of
Photoshop Product Management Kevin Connor, Photoshop co-creator Thomas Knoll
and famed Adobe creative director and Photoshop evangelist Russell Brown."
"For 20 years Photoshop has played many different roles—it has given
creative people the power to deliver amazing images that impact every part of
our visual culture and challenged the eye with its ability to transform
photographs," Adobe President and CEO Shantanu
Narayen said in a statement. "It's no exaggeration to say that, thanks to
millions of creative customers, Photoshop has changed the way the world looks
at itself."
The Adobe release continued:
"In 1987, Thomas Knoll developed
a pixel imaging program called Display. It was a simple program to showcase
grayscale images on a black-and-white monitor. However, after collaborating
with his brother John Knoll, the two began adding features that made it
possible to process digital image files. The program eventually caught the
attention of industry influencers, and in 1988, Adobe made the decision to
license the software, naming it Photoshop, and shipping the first version in
1990.
"Twenty years ago, Adobe
predicted that it would sell 500 copies of Photoshop per month," said
Thomas Knoll, co-creator of Photoshop at Adobe. "I guess you could say, we
beat those projections! It's amazing to think that millions of people use this
software today. We knew we had a groundbreaking technology on our hands, but we
never anticipated how much it would impact the images we see all around us. The
ability to seamlessly place someone within an image was just the beginning of
Photoshop's magic."
Over its 20-year history, Photoshop
has evolved significantly from a simple original display program to a wildly
popular application that has over 10 million users worldwide. With each
release, Adobe has introduced technological innovations that defy the
impossible. Layers, introduced in Photoshop 3.0, gave designers the ability to
create complex compositions [more easily] than ever before. The Healing Brush,
another groundbreaking feature introduced in Photoshop 7.0, allowed users to
magically retouch images by seamlessly removing blemishes and wrinkles, while
preserving lighting and texture. Photoshop tools like crop, eraser, blur and
dodge and burn have become part of the creative vernacular worldwide."
And on Feb. 19, Ansca, a mobile applications development platform maker,
said in a news release:
"A limited-edition Adobe
Photoshop 20th anniversary commemorative iPhone app was released to select
attendees today at the Photoshop 20th Anniversary Event [...]
"The Photoshop 20th Anniversary
app was spearheaded by Russell Brown, Adobe's Senior Creative Director and one
of the original Photoshop team members. The app itself is a replica of
Photoshop 1.0, which Adobe debuted in 1990 exclusively on the Macintosh.
"I really wanted to do something
special to commemorate 20 years of Photoshop, and the best thing I thought of
was a nostalgic iPhone app," said Brown. "Since I had less than two
weeks to make it happen, I came to the best iPhone team I knew, who were able
to use their Corona SDK to pull it off with utmost speed and faithfulness to
the original product."
To build the app, Brown enlisted the
help of Ansca Mobile, creators of the
Corona SDK. The Ansca team used Corona to bring the essence of the original
Photoshop to the iPhone."
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