Archive notice: This article was originally published on February 18, 2010. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Adobe Photoshop turns 20 on February 19, 2010. Around the world, Photoshop fans are celebrating the impact their favourite software has had on photography, art, design, publishing and business. Today, the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) is holding a “20 Years of Photoshop” birthday celebration for more than a thousand attendees at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater in San Francisco. Participants also include John Loiacono, Senior Vice President Creative Solutions at Adobe, Kevin Connor, Vice President Photoshop Product Management, Photoshop co-inventor Thomas Knoll, and Adobe Creative Director and Photoshop evangelist Russell Brown. The celebration can be joined via live webcast.
Celebrations are planned around the world. To mark the 20th birthday, Adobe Germany will hold a 20-hour online marathon in which 15 local “Photoshop gurus” will present their best tips and tricks live. Digital image-editing competitions featuring the work of Photoshop users will take place in France and India. Adobe TV will also broadcast a special programme: for the first time in 18 years, the original Photoshop team will meet, discuss its early work on the software and present Photoshop 1.0 on a Macintosh computer.
The Photoshop community is also exchanging ideas online. On the Facebook page, which now has more than 400,000 fans, users are publishing their favourite stories about the software. The new “Celebrate” tab directs users straight to a special birthday logo, which many have already personalised using Photoshop and use as their own profile picture.
Photoshop’s influence is present everywhere: billboards, magazine covers, major feature films or even the logo on the coffee cup you drink from every morning. All of these things probably came into contact with this software at some point during their creation. More than 90 percent of all creative professionals use Photoshop on their computers. Today, Photoshop is used by professional photographers, graphic designers and advertisers, as well as by architects, engineers and even doctors. Whether it is used for visual effects for the feature film Avatar, cooperation with forensic institutes or determining with the human eye whether an image is real or artificially created – Photoshop continues to find new applications, users and advocates.
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How it all began
In 1987, Thomas Knoll developed a programme called Display. This was a simple application for showing greyscale images on a black-and-white screen. Together with his brother John Knoll, he began adding functions to this application that enabled the editing of digital image files. Adobe decided to license the software in 1988, call it “Photoshop” and then released the first version in 1990.
“Twenty years ago, Adobe expected to sell about 500 copies of Photoshop per month,” said Photoshop co-inventor Thomas Knoll. “Looking back, it is fair to say that this forecast was far exceeded! It is incredible that millions of people use the software today. At the time, we knew we had pioneering technology in our hands. But we never expected it to have such a major impact on the images we see around us. The ability simply to place someone within an image was only the beginning of the magic that surrounds Photoshop today.”
Over its 20-year history, Photoshop has evolved considerably – from a simple image-display programme into a popular application with more than 10 million users worldwide. Adobe integrated technological innovations into every new version that made previously impossible things possible. Layers, introduced in Photoshop 3.0, allow designers to create complex compositions more easily than ever before. The Healing Brush, another groundbreaking function introduced in Photoshop 7.0, enables images to be retouched as if by magic, seamlessly removing blemishes and wrinkles while retaining lighting and textures. Photoshop features such as the crop tool, eraser, blur, dodge and burn have now become an integral part of the creative vocabulary around the world.
The Photoshop team is also highly successful with its beta-tester programme, through which users have actively contributed to the design and development of new functions for years. Adobe also maintains a close exchange with its users through blogs, customer surveys, support, forums and feedback from Adobe evangelists who travel the world to make direct contact with the Photoshop community.
Further links:
- Live webcast of the birthday celebration
Adobe TV special programme
Adobe Facebook page
