Your birthday is a special time to celebrate the gift of ‘you’ to the world. And Photoshop, the graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems, turns twenty Friday Feb. 19. I can truthfully say it has only gotten better with age.
The talented Knoll family from Ann Arbor, Michigan engineered the core idea of Photoshop. The father, Glen Knoll was an engineering professor who had a darkroom in his basement. His two sons, Thomas and John Knoll, were a Ph.D. engineering student at the University of Michigan and a special effects employee working at Industrial Light and Magic.
Thomas Knoll wrote a successful program to translate monochrome images on his computer to grayscale. This led Thomas to create more processes achieving photographic effects on digital images.
Thomas’ brother, John saw what he was doing and recommended he turn it into a full-time job. The combination of Thomas’ programming abilities and John’s design background led to collaboration between the two brothers to develop and improve upon the initial application. They introduced “Image Pro” in 1988.
In 1990, they formed a licensing partnership with Adobe and Photoshop 1.0 was released exclusively for Macintosh computers.
Today, Adobe Photoshop CS is equipped with such diverse features as anti-counterfeiting measures for multiple world currencies and a healing brush tool that removes pimples and unwanted blemishes. It wasn’t until 1994 (in version 3) that the new feature called “layers” was developed
The use of Photoshop has been heavily responsible for creating a generation of skeptics, thanks to scandals in both photojournalism and tabloid images.
It’s difficult to imagine where the field of photography, the Web or even family Christmas cards would be without Photoshop.
So, I invite everyone to open the program on the nineteenth, and whisper a little “Happy B-day,” in their computer screen’s speaker.