How did Photoshop come about?

Adobe Photoshop has been a killer application for the Macintosh for some time. In the mid-90s, publishing and graphic design crowded out ordinary consumers as an important market, at least in the eyes of Apple CEO Jill Amelio and Michael Spindler. Consumer Macs faded from the fact that Apple invested a lot of money in the development of multiprocessor Macs and crazy replacements for the Mac OS operating system. Even after Apple emerged from the mid-90s crisis, Photoshop remained extremely popular, and even turned into a verb that describes the process of retouching and editing images, despite Adobe's reluctance to do so.


Knolls

Photoshop is not the result of careful work in the bowels of Adobe. On the contrary, it was designed by Thomas Knoll and his brother John. Boys' father, Glenn Knoll, was a professional photographer and an early supporter of microcomputers - the addictions that his boys inherited from him. John became interested in photography, showing his film in his father's darkroom. His hobby was not limited to simple interest, as later he went into color printing, and this is a very meticulous process compared to the manifestation of black and white film. Having learned the art of manipulating color and exposing the photographs he took, John acquired the skills that he later implements in Photoshop.

John was terribly in love with programming. His father brought Apple II + to the house and he became his programming environment. John quickly became friends with the computer. In an interview with Apple, he said that his father "used the computer for his research, and this happened mainly in the evenings, so when he came home from school, the computer beckoned him to him." In 1984, to the delight of John, Glenn replaced the aging Apple II + with the new Macintosh. From that moment on, he became a Macintosh adherent. John was able to combine his hobbies with his career when he settled in Industrial Light and Magic - one of the branches of Pixar.

Display

Thomas went to college, received a bachelor of science degree from the University of Michigan, and began working on his doctorate in computer imaging or, as the University of Michigan alumni magazine means, “digital imaging.” Thomas acquired Mac + for his work. Unfortunately, Mac + was not designed to view images in color, or even in black and white. To enable him to continue his research, Thomas wrote a program that allowed him to view images using anti-aliasing on a 1-bit display (black and white), and which he called Display. Display did not have a graphical interface; it used the command line of the C shell. The program could do nothing more than display color or black and white images on Mac +. Thomas's brother was so overwhelmed by this program,

In Industrial Light and Magic, John took advantage of his brother's program and was amazed. Industrial Light and Magic was one of the first companies to receive Pixar Image computers, which Pixar developed at Lucas Film, before they went on sale in 1985. In an interview with Industrial Light and Magic, John said: “As soon as Tom showed me his program, I was amazed at how it looked like the image processing tools Pixar used.” The only big difference was that Display worked on Mac + for $ 2,599, while the Pixar cost $ 135,000. John suggested Thomas turn his program into an image editor that would allow users to manipulate their digital images as if they were in a darkroom.

Photoshop

In 1988, Display was previously renamed ImagePro and Thomas began adding editing features to the program. To begin with, John suggested adding a gamma correction function so that images can be made dimmer when displayed on the screen, but Thomas soon added a lot of techniques that he learned in his father’s darkroom. John was the first to propose using ImagePro as a commercial product, instead of the freely distributed shareware, but not one of the brothers had any idea how difficult it would be to find a distributor and raise the program to the level that the consumer needed. Thomas put off his doctorate for half a year and tried to turn ImagePro into a commercial product.



Image editing was not new to Macs or personal computers in general. Amiga computers were very beloved by professional photographers for their graphics and editing capabilities. Unfortunately, some commercial software companies have not seen the prospects for Photoshop. According to Story Photography, Thomas brought a copy of the program to Super Mac - a company that later became known for its line of Mac clones and video cards, but the company already had a less functional Pixel Paint program that was more suitable for Mac Paint users than professional photographers. In the end, Barney Scan, the scanner manufacturer, released the program, although perhaps not in the form that Thomas wanted. ImagePro, which was renamed to Photoshop due to trademark conflicts,

Fortunately, Thomas did not sell Photoshop Barney Scan, but only licensed. The commercial distribution of the program increased Thomas's capabilities, which affected his campaign in Adobe in September 1988. Adobe's creative department, led by Russell Brown, fell in love with the program, and they were not alone. The first version of the program was released in February 1990, and by 2000 more than 3 million copies were sold, and most likely the product is used on even more computers thanks to pirates.

Conclusion

The popularity and versatility of the program greatly influenced Apple's business. Professional photographers crowded around Power Macs, which cost $ 10,000, bringing Apple a huge profit. When Apple decided to hold a position in the home and workstation market, the graphics market, and mainly the publishing, became very important. Lamar Potts, vice president of an Apple division, told the press that his priority was to concentrate on “specialized market segments, such as the high-end graphics market.” Even after Photoshop was ported to the Windows platform, Macs remained the choice of professionals for their high performance when working with graphics.

Toolbar changes (for a new picture - thanks alammi ):


Original icons for the program that John Knoll painted: