Photoshop is by far the most widely-used and successful image editing software created. It has changed the entire process of image manipulation, launching a new industry, and today, over 90% of the world’s creative professionals use Adobe Photoshop.
Before the onset of Photoshop, graphic design was a manual process. Editing a single image would take a few days, often requiring meticulous planning with a team of designers and typographers. These graphic designers usually developed black and white layouts that would be overlayed with instructions for the printer. To create these layouts, designs would attach various elements with rubber cement, utilize french rulers to create curves, and take up to 24 hours just for a type change. This video from LinkedIn Learning does a great job of outlining this pre-Photoshop material process.
Photoshop was developed in 1987 by two brothers, Thomas and John Knoll. Thomas Knoll was a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in Computer Science. He acquired a Macintosh Plus and was soon surprised that he could not display grayscale photos on its monochrome display, so he decided to code a solution. John Kroll worked within the cinema visual effects industry at this time and was incredibly impressed by his brother’s grayscale solution. John convinced him to take his programming a step further to develop it into a full-fledged image editing program. Afterward, Thomas took a 6-month leave of absence to create this software, which he originally named ImagePro. Soon after, it was changed to Photoshop. The brothers worked out a short-term deal with scanner manufacturer Barneyscan to distribute the program with an image scanner, and only 200 copies of Photoshop were ultimately sold and shipped with Barneyscan.
John later traveled to Silicon Valley to demonstrate his program to engineers at Apple and to Russell Brown, then art director at Adobe. At that time, Adobe’s main source of revenue was PostScript, a software that translated shapes, colors, fonts, and sizes into mathematical equations that could be interpreted by any printer or device. Adobe already had a place in the design world, but it did not yet offer an image editing software. The Kroll brothers eventually won over Adobe executives, and Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990. This version has some of Photoshop’s most famous tools, including the lasso, blur, sharpen, fill, magic wand, and eyedropper. Here’s a video of John Kroll demonstrating the capacities of Adobe Photoshop 1.0. Then, the list price for Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was $895, and it was available only for Apple computers.
Photoshop 2.0 was released in 1991, introducing the paths feature, as well as supporting CMYK and EPS rasterization. This version required double the RAM of the first version and was still exclusively available for Macs. A year and a half later, Adobe Photoshop 2.5 was released, supported both by Macs and Windows, making it one of the first cross-platform software. For this to be possible, the entire code behind the program had needed to be rewritten for the Windows operating system. Later on, Adobe Photoshop 3.0 brought forth one of its most iconic features: layers. To learn more about each version of Photoshops, this article explains major developments in each version.
In 2013, Adobe changed its pricing structure — instead of purchasing Adobe Photoshop within the Creative Suite on one local computer, Adobe decided to introduce a subscription-based model. This allowed a single customer to have the program on multiple devices. Another benefit of this subscription model is that users did not have to purchase new versions of the software with each update. Additionally, depending on the plan purchased, the user can gain access to additional design software such as Adobe Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and InDesign. This model later transitioned into the variety of plans available today.
The Future of Photoshop
Adobe has already begun to introduce Artificial Intelligence within the program with the “select subject” function. A clever algorithm is used to determine which pixels are likely included in the main subject of the page. Photoshop will include more of these algorithms in the future to guess viewers’ intent and make the image-editing process more efficient for those who already have experience with the software.
If Adobe Photoshop has one major flaw, it’s the intense learning curve of the program. Adobe tries to alleviate this pain by offering short onboarding tutorials and recommending users solutions to complex issues through its online forum. However, even graphic designers who have been using the program for years don’t know the full capacity of the application. When there are infinite options available, it becomes difficult to know where to start or what to look for.
Today, there are multiple Photoshop alternatives available for beginner artists and elite designers alike. Some of these alternatives including Procreate, Rebelle, Photopea, and Sketch. Many Photoshop alternatives focus on improving the digital painting experience, while others focus on UX/UI design or offer free online image editing services.
Photoshop’s ultimate replacement may not even come as an application but as a real-time editing tool. An article by Jennifer Smith discusses the potential of real-time image correction. “Researchers from MIT and Google have demonstrated real-time corrections which can be applied to improve an image in less than 20 milliseconds right at the time a picture is captured.” This technology could be applied to live streams and broadcasts without the viewer’s notice. However, the existence of deep fakes already threatens the transparent spread of digital information. Perhaps a real-time image editor would alter our perceptions of what is real, challenging what we know to be true and beautiful in life. If the world began to seem more beautiful or engaging on-screen rather than off, who would ever disconnect?
Photoshop is not a perfect application, but it has had a tremendous impact on contemporary image culture, advertising, and the art world, through its possibilities for unbounded creativity and potential. For now, Photoshop will remain a staple among designers, but as technology advances and becomes more integrated with our lives, so too will this software. This may bring a slightly false reality, but a beautiful one as well.
