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What Is the History of Photoshop?

Last updated on September 24, 2022 @ 1:28 am

Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for macOS and Windows. Photoshop was created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, it has become the de facto industry standard in raster graphics editing, to the point that Photoshop has become a generic trademark leading to its usage as a verb such as “to Photoshop an image,” “photoshopping” and “Photoshop contest”, although Adobe discourages such use.

A raster graphics editor is a computer program that allows users to create and edit images interactively on the computer screen and save them in one of many popular “bitmap” or “raster” formats such as JPEG, GIF, TIFF, and PNG. Raster editors are the most common type of graphics editor, whereas vector graphic editors are relatively rare due to the specialized nature of the vector graphic format.

Photoshop was originally developed by Thomas and John Knoll, brothers who grew up in Michigan. Thomas Knoll, a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, began writing a program on his Apple II in 1984 to display grayscale images on a monochrome display.

This program, called Display, caught the attention of his brother John, an Industrial Light & Magic employee who recommended that Thomas turn it into a full-fledged image editing program. Thomas took a six-month break from his studies in 1986 to collaborate with John on the program, which they named “ImagePro.”

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The first version of Photoshop was released on February 19, 1990 for Macintosh exclusively. The software soon became widely popular; by 1992 it had already outsold all other Macintosh software titles combined. It quickly gained popularity among professional photographers and amateur enthusiasts alike; within two years of its release it had become the industry standard applications for digital image manipulation and creation.

In 1992, Adobe released Photoshop for Windows, followed by Photoshop 3.0 in 1994 which introduced layers allowing multiple images to be edited as separate elements. Version 4.0 (1996) brought support for 32-bit color depth (previously it had been limited to 8-bit), new selection tools, custom brushes and patterns, layer styles, healing brushes, and many other features which are now taken for granted in modern image editors.

Since its initial release over 25 years ago, Photoshop has undergone numerous updates and improvements; it is now on version CC (Creative Cloud). The latest version introduces several new features such as an enhanced Healing Brush tool, improved content-aware fills, intelligent upsampling (enlarging low-resolution images), and support for SVG color fonts.

What Is the History of Photoshop?

Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor that was first developed in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, Photoshop has become the industry standard for editing digital images due to its comprehensive set of features and ease of use. The latest version of Photoshop introduces several new features such as enhanced healing brush tool, improved content-aware fills, intelligent upsampling, and support for SVG color fonts.

Madison Geldart

Madison Geldart

Cloud infrastructure engineer and tech mess solver.