Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll.
Since then, the software has become the industry standard not only in raster graphics editing, but in digital art as a whole. The software’s name has thus become a generic trademark, leading to its usage as a verb (e.g. “to Photoshop an image”, “photoshopping” or “Photoshop job”) although Adobe discourages such use.
Photoshop was first released on February 19, 1990, for Macintosh exclusively. The first Windows version was released on November 15 of the same year. The program was initially published by Aldus Corporation, before being acquired by Adobe in 1994.
The earliest version of Photoshop was a simple image editing program called Display that Thomas Knoll created while he was a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan. His brother, John Knoll, who was also studying at the university, saw the program and suggested that Thomas turn it into a full-fledged image editing application. The two brothers spent the next two years working on the program in their spare time; Thomas focused on the code, while John worked on designing the user interface.
By early 1988, they had completed a functioning version of Photoshop and decided to try to sell it to Aldus Corporation, a leading desktop publishing software company at the time. However, Aldus was not interested in acquiring the software, so the Knolls took their project to market themselves. They founded their own company, called Knoll Software Inc., and began selling Photoshop 1.0 in April of that year.
Since its inception, Photoshop has been regularly updated with new features and technologies; it is currently on its 26th major release, which was launched in October 2019.
Adobe Photoshop has come a long way since its first release in 1990. It is now the industry standard for digital art as a whole.
The software’s name has become a generic trademark, leading to its usage as a verb (e. “to Photoshop an image”, “photoshopping” or “Photoshop job”).
