Milestone: 30 years of Photoshop!

Wednesday 26 February 2020, 20:10 by Michelle Peeters | 4,750 views | 0 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

The world's best-known photo-editing programme recently celebrated its 30th birthday. Photoshop is not only an icon in the creative world, photo-shopping has even become an official verb in the Dutch language.

The first version of Photoshop was not quite the gem it is today, as this article will hopefully make clear.

The first demo of Photoshop

The Knoll brothers

Brothers John and Thomas Knoll got on very well and they were responsible for the creation of the Photoshop programme, which was licensed in 1990.

John was very impressed by the Pixar Image computer, which could convert an image into numbers. Those numbers could then be manipulated with this far too expensive device.

John then decided to develop a cheaper device together with his brother for editing photos. This eventually became Photoshop as software.

In 1987, John created the first photoshopped photo ever, a (topless) photo of his own wife on Bora Bora. He called the legendary photo 'Jennifer in Paradise'.

Jennifer (John's future wife) and John both worked at Industrial Light & Magic, which was responsible for, among other things, the special effects in Star Wars. They were on holiday together, not yet married and tired from the filming of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, when John took the photo. He then immediately asked his girlfriend to marry him.

A very powerful photo editor

Photoshop is now much more powerful than just something you can use to remove red eyes. In 1986, the first version of Photoshop ran on a Macintosh Plus computer, with an 8 megahertz CPU and 4 megabytes of working memory, which was very modern at the time.

Even then, the programme already contained many features, many of which we still see in current versions.

Photoshop is of course a blessing when it comes to photo editing. You can use it to create fantastic artistic creations. But there is also a downside, you can use it to spread fake news or make things look perfect, resulting in unattainable beauty standards.

Adobe is working hard on that. They are developing AI (artificial intelligence) applications that can determine whether or not a photo has been edited. But ultimately, they are of course still proud of Photoshop. It is up to the user's ethics whether they use it for good or bad things.

Visual effects with Photoshop in James Cameron's The Abyss

Improvements

Layers were not invented until four years later. To celebrate the 30th anniversary, Adobe released improvements to Photoshop on the iPad and desktop computers, including a dark mode for MacOS and a better filler, which is more aware of the context and means you do not have to leave the workspace.

In addition, Lens Blur has been improved, making the realism and sharpness of Lens Blur better and allowing certain items in your photo to be blurred more beautifully.

You can now create a better bokeh effect, something that is also widely used in smartphone photography to keep the object in the foreground sharp and blur the background. It now looks more three-dimensional.

New features have also been released for the new Photoshop for the iPad, including a new brush for making edges you have cut out sharper and a better way to select objects, making the entire process easier to use on the tablet. Finally, there is better support for fonts and effects applied to them.

30 years old and still alive and kicking

Photoshop is therefore already 30 years old and is still used a great deal, which is quite remarkable! There are of course always people who swear by other photo editors, but Photoshop remains the most widely used.

Even in the field of AI (Artificial Intelligence), Photoshop does not seem to be on the decline yet.

Congratulations!

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