Friday, February 19, 2010

Happy Birthday Photoshop- Adobe Photoshop Celebrates 20 Years

  
Hard as it may be to believe today, once upon a time you had to take your pictures carefully and develop them with even greater care; a lost memory then was truly lost.
But all that started to change 20 years ago on Friday, when the first version of Photoshop was released, and began to usher in the age of digital photograph editing that we depend on more than ever today. Now we can't just imagine a world without Photoshop, we can't imagine the English language without it. How many software packages become verbs?
The Photoshop story began in 1987, when Thomas Knoll programmed a pixel imaging program he called Display. It didn't do much; primarily, it displayed grayscale images on a black-and-white monitor. But it also provided a creative foundation for what would soon become one of the most important apps in the world. Knoll and his brother, John, built on Display's functionality by giving it processing capabilities. Adobe licensed the software in 1988, renamed it Photoshop, and shipped the first version on February 19, 1990.
Since then, Photoshop has become a phenomenon, its capabilities becoming synonymous with graphic design the world over. Many of the features that even casual users take for granted now weren't in the earliest incarnations: layers, without which any large-scale task would seem impossible today, weren't introduced until version 3.0; the healing brush, which essentially made wrinkles, pimples, and moles a thing of the past, bowed in version 7.0. Adobe estimates that there are more than 10 million users of Photoshop worldwide.
"Twenty years ago, Adobe predicted that it would sell 500 copies of Photoshop per month," Thomas Knoll said in a statement. "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."
"For 20 years Photoshop has played many different roles," said Shantanu Narayen, the president and chief executive of Adobe. "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. It's no exaggeration to say that, thanks to millions of creative customers, Photoshop has changed the way the world looks at itself."
Adobe is celebrating Photoshop's birthday with events around the world. Adobe Germany is hosting a 20-hour online marathon, featuring 15 local Photoshop experts revealing some of their favorite secret tricks. Digital imaging contests in India and France will showcase the work of Photoshop users in those countries.
There are plenty of online festivities, as well. You can check out the webcast of a celebration the National Association of Photoshop Professionals will host at the Palace of the Fine Arts Theater in San Francisco on Thursday night at 7:30 PM, where key figures in Photoshop's birth and adolescence will be on hand to commemorate the event. Or you can watch a special Adobe TV broadcast that reunites the original Photoshop team and offers glimpses of the fabled Photoshop 1.0, working on a refurbished Mac from that long-ago era. Of course a Facebook group and Twitter feed are also involved.
If you think this year's festivities are something, just wait until next year, when Photoshop will finally be able to drink. That's going to be a party worth remembering. And one thing's for sure: The photos will look terrific.

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