20 Years of Image Editing: Photoshop from 1.0 to CS4
Posted 02/18/2010 at 10:13pm
| by David Biedny
From its humble beginnings on a grad student's Mac Plus to its complete photo-editing domination, Photoshop has changed the world in 20 short years.
Photoshop is everywhere. And while fundamentally it is the standard professional-quality image editor, it’s also a cultural touchstone with a reach that extends to advertising, fashion magazines, television, film, and the news. Lighter versions like Photoshop Elements, Photoshop.com, and even Photoshop Mobile on the iPhone have distilled its power for the masses, and sites like PhotoshopDisasters.blogspot.com chronicle painful misuses for everyone to point at and giggle about. “Photoshop” the verb was even added to Webster’s dictionary in 1992.
In such a Photoshop-saturated society, it’s easy to forget that the software hasn’t been around forever. Since February 2010 marks the 20th anniversary of Photoshop 1.0, now is the perfect time to revisit everything from Adobe’s systematic dismantling of its competition to the way the software was used to make Katie Couric “lose weight.”
Two Decades of Photoshop
We give you every single Photoshop release, plus the effects of Adobe's software on its competition and our culture.
1987

Release: Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, creates a program called Display for his Mac Plus. It can display 256-shade grayscale images on a 1-bit black-and-white screen with dithering.
1988

Release: Display is renamed Photoshop, and the Knoll brothers (Thomas and John, an effects expert at Industrial Light & Magic [ILM]) license the first version to Barneyscan, a slide-scanner manufacturer. Approximately 200 copies of version 0.87 ship bundled with the scanners.

Cultural: The first working version of Photoshop appears at Apple, and the era of Photoshop piracy begins as engineers pass it around amongst themselves and gape in awe.
1989
Release: John Knoll demos Photoshop for Adobe's primary art director Russell Brown and founder John Warnock. Adobe signs a distribution deal with the Knoll brothers.
1990

Release: Photoshop 1.0 ships. It requires an 8MHz processor and 2MB of RAM. The software fits on a single 3.5-inch floppy disk. Key features include color correction, image optimization for output, Curves, Levels, and the Clone tool.
Cultural: Photoshop is used extensively at ILM during postproduction work on The Abyss.
1991
Cultural: ILM continues to use Photoshop to create digital composite shots for movies like The Rocketeer, Hook, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Release: Photoshop 2.0 (code-named Fast Eddy) ships with CMYK support, Duotones, the Path tool, and rasterization of Illustrator files. But the HSB and HSL color modes in 1.0 are gone.

Cultural: John Knoll covertly releases a program to revert Adobe Photoshop's "eye" application icons back to the original "1HR Photo Shop" icon.
Release: Adobe releases an SDK for third-party plug-in development. Later in the year, Aldus (developer of PageMaker) releases the Gallery Effects plug-in package.
1992
Release: Kai Krause releases Kai's Power Tools, a popular plug-in set for Photoshop featuring graphically rich (and often bewildering) visual interfaces.
1993
Release: Photoshop 2.5 (code-named Merlin) ships with 16-bit image support, palettes, Quick Mask, Dodge and Burn tools, and the Variations visual color-correction tool. This is the first Photoshop version available on Windows as well as Mac.
1994
Cultural: Time magazine runs a cover photo of O.J. Simpson that was photoshopped with very dark color correction, creating controversy over how African Americans are portrayed by the media.

Release: Photoshop 3.0 (code-named Tiger Mountain) introduces image layers, often considered the most important feature ever added to the program.
Release: Alien Skin Software delivers the first drop-shadow effect plugin for Photoshop.
Competition: Adobe acquires Aldus, keeping PageMaker on life support by burying Windows-only image editor PhotoStyler.
Competition: HSC Software introduces Live Picture, billed as a next-generation nondestructive image editor, for a whopping introductory price of $3,995.
1995
Competition: HSC Software lowers Live Picture price to $995 in one fell swoop, angering early adopters who paid full price.
Competition: Quark introduces XPosure image-editing software at the Seybold Seminars in Boston. Developed in conjunction with Japanese electronics giant JVC, the product boasts a nondestructive filter featuring "lenses"... but it never ships.
1996

Release: Photoshop 4.0 (code-named Big Electric cat) ships with nondestructive adjustment layers, Actions, macros, grids, guides, the Free Transform tool, and a radically redesigned user interface. Photoshop 4.0 LE (Limited Edition) is bundled with a wide range of image scanners.
Competition: Macromedia ships its xRes image editor, which also features nondestructive image editing. Although it soon became another footnote in image editing hisotry, you can still see a bit of its DNA in Adobe Fireworks.
Next Page: Photoshop Timeline continued >>