The History of Photoshop

Gammu writes "For the past fifteen plus years, Photoshop has turned into the killer app for graphics designers on the Mac. It was originally written as a support app for a grad student's thesis and struggled to find wide commercial release. Eventually, Adobe licensed the app and has sold millions of copies." Achewood's Chris Onstad also offers a different take of how it all went down.

But Does It Run On Linux?

...Oh :(

Re:But Does It Run On Linux?

Linux User #1: Bring out the Gimp.

Linux User #2: But the Gimp's sleeping.

Linux User #1: Well, I guess you're gonna have to go wake him up now, won't you?

Re:But Does It Run On Linux?

Please let's not have another pointless "Is the GIMP a Photoshop replacement?" debate. They're about as pointless as an ostensibly professional-level graphics editing program without proper CMYK support.

Re:But Does It Run On Linux?

ostensibly professional-level graphics

But the GIMP isn't supposed to be a professional-level graphics application. I think Paint Shop Pro is a better GIMP equivalent: an application designed for the advanced home user who needs something above MSPAINT but would never use more than 1/128th of Photoshop's feature set.

"professional-level", what do you mean?

...pointless as an ostensibly professional-level...

It has been ten years already that Clayton Christensen's book "The Innovator's Dilemma" was published. In that book he compared the evolution of several businesses, such as computer disk drives, excavating machines, and department stores.

The conclusion is that there is no fixed point separating "professional" equipment from "entry-level". Systems that are designed for amateurs or small businesses will evolve and become adopted more and more widely by professionals, until the old "professional-level" manufacturers go out of business.

What do the Gimp, Linux, 3.5 inch hard disks, and backhoe excavators have in common? They were created for amateurs, but are now used by many businesses. Perhaps there are some huge databases where 3.5 inch disks won't do and there may exist some mines where cable-actuated mechanical excavators are still used, but they are becoming less and less common.

If I were a Photoshop designer I would at least make an effort to learn how to use the Gimp. At least that seems the prudent thing to do.

Re:"professional-level", what do you mean?

What do digital cameras, high-spec computers, and audio recording devices have in common? They were created for professionals, but have now permeated the amateur market. Perhaps there are some professional photographers who regularly use dinky point-and-shoot cameras for work and there may exist some animation studios where Celerons with 64mb RAM are still used, but they are becoming less and less common.

Most equipment starts out as expensive, professional-grade products which percolate down to amateur-grade products. The first digital SLR was based on Nikon's then top-of-the-line F3 model and cost in the tens of thousands of dollars. Now, you can buy a point-and-shoot with a plastic lens for under $10. Likewise, ENIAC wasn't a desk toy, whereas the Bondi Blue iMac arguably is.

BTW, most large databases are stored on expensive RAID systems with equally expensive tape backups. No serious business ever used floppies to backup its important data.

Licensed?

I think it was less Adobe's licencing of the product than simply their tacit approval of its widespread warezing that lead to the rise of Photoshop. Despite it's obscene price, Adobe have never seemed interested in curbing the rampant pirating of this particular product.

The reason is obvious of course. Better for Johnny the budding graphics designer to get familiar with "'Shopping" than take the legal route and become familiar with the like of the Gimp, etc. Personally, I think Adobe themselves upload the lastest hacked copies of Photoshop to the usual places.

Re:Licensed?

I would also consider Adobe's student pricing at the time Photoshop was beginning on the road to domination. The last time I was in school (maybe 15 years ago), I was able to purchase Photoshop (2.0 or 2.5, I believe) for about $40. Pretty affordable, even for a grad student. That pricing had to help its widespread adoption.

These days, the education price for Photoshop is $299. That's a lot of beer when you're a student with access to massive bandwidth...

DN

Gimp!=pro application

Obviously, you come from outside the pro graphics world--the GIMP lacks basic functionality (such as CMYK colorspace for one), and is simply not ready for prime-time in this arena. In other words, if Johnny takes the Gimp route, he's going to find himself dealing with a bunch of issues that may be fun for geeks to overcome, but in this case, would take him away from the real task of image editing, unencumbered by software limitations. Photoshop is expensive because it's the best of breed by a wide margin, and Adobe knows it.

Eventually?

Eventually, Adobe licensed the app and has sold millions of copies.

*sigh*

It's not like Adobe didn't put a LITTLE bit of work into it over the years, you know? They didn't just license it, they've - for all practical purposes - completely rebuilt it over and over. If they hadn't, that which they licensed would have been totally eclipsed by products like Corel's PhotoPaint, etc. CS3 has about as much resemblance to the initial product as ... well, it doesn't have much. Bridge? ACR? All of the related products like Lightroom? The HISTORY of it is a little academic, at this point (both literally and figuratively).

Re:Eventually?

The basic toolbox in photoshop 1.0 is not that far removed from the one in photoshop CS3. You can see the lineage. Maybe the back-end is completely new, but the front-end has merely expanded.

Which is sort of a shame, because the photoshop tools are a bit clumsy to use, and things like the selection tool could be implemented much better if they weren't afraid of alienating the existing customer base with changed behavior.

Re:Eventually?

Not only has the front-end been rewritten several times, they've released the framework that they use [adobe.com] as open source.

Lack of colour display

Looking back, it seemed a bit crazy that the Mac wasn't colour for many years. Especially given the competition.

Maybe we would all be using Macs if they at least had a 16 or 256 colour display a few years earlier.

Re:Lack of colour display

the Mac wasn't colour for many years

Huh? The Mac came out in 1984 and the color Mac II came out in 1987. I'd hardly call 3 years "many" and yes, the competition (Amiga, Atari ST) had color from the start (1985) and until VGA appeared for PCs in 1987, the state of color PC graphics (CGA, EGA) was poor, to say the least.

A question for large print graphics designers...

Photoshop is put on a pedestal as being THE ONLY program you should use to edit images.

I was wondering why that is?

Is it because graphics designers who do large print are used to using Photoshop and do not see a point in switching to an unknown program?
Is it because there are no alternatives that have the features they need?

Are free programs such as the GIMP just not on par? I have used Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and GIMP but I don't really see why Photoshop is hallmarked as the best. That being said I am not a graphics expert so I was wondering if someone who is and used these programs for more then 5 minutes could give me a good answer.

Re:A question for large print graphics designers..

For one thing Photoshop has a lot of commercial plugins available for it. Generally when professionals say they use Photoshop they mean they use Photoshop and a lot of plugins that just aren't available for other graphics programs like GIMP.

Re:A question for large print graphics designers..

Your message is written with such a serious tone, and I'll bite.
  Do a slashdot search for any of the following terms, and you'll quickly be drawn into threads about why :
      * GIMP;
      * CMYK;
      * Plugin xXx will do what you're looking for;
      * But it won't do it in 32-bit colour with customized colourmap support unless you compile it yourself and since I use gentoo I'm still waiting for KDE to finish compiling;
      * Yur momma is teh BOM in bed;
      * Hitler used Photoshop;
      * Suck a cock and die.

      I always read those threads, mainly because I am interested in German history and human psychology. I couldn't give a rat's ass about Photoshop or graphic design.

Re:A question for large print graphics designers..

I do graphic design for a living, and there are a number of areas where The GIMP is lacking - but the big issue is in color space allowances. No CMYK support means no worky in the print world (unless your press uses RGB). I have to be able to not only convert an image to CMYK, but also control the colors to an extreme - I've had to remove all the color plates from the shot, increase the black plate to compensate, and then paint in spot red (for our press, that is 100% magenta, 50-60% yellow) over certain parts. Plus, the integration into the other parts of my work (working in InDesign/Illustrator for ads) is purely delightful.

Plus, CS2's RAW image importing is.. well.. I love it. Can't even begin to describe how great it is to use it's interface to import raw photos.

I still use the GIMP regularly - for minor stuff - at home. I still prefer my copy of Photoshop 6, though, for anything with any involvement.

Re:A question for large print graphics designers..

Some quotes from that page:

"A plugin providing rudimentary CMYK support for The GIMP"

"this is experimental software"

"This plug-in goes some small way towards rectifying the situation"

I like Gimp, but that plugin doesn't sound like it provides professional CMYK support. And it looks like the project is dead:

The plugin is unfinished, but usable for its primary purpose, and since I'm unlikely to have time to develop it further in the near future, I'm releasing it as is.

Re:A question for large print graphics designers..

When you are working on a $7,500 contract producing media that will cost the client over $50,000 to print you don't trust your color profiles to some unknown program.

I can tell you that companies get really, really angry when their logo color comes out wrong. Sometimes you can blame the printer, but more typically it's the designer.

Adobe products do have quirks and some features do have steep learning curves, but they all do color extremely well and are very consistent.

Re:A question for large print graphics designers..

Well, good CMYK support and reliable color workflow are two of the biggies for anyone who does graphic editing / design comping on a professional level.

It handles type (CS2 and later) better than any competitor.

It allows vector-based postscript overlays.

It allows nearly unlimited undos (history palette)

It allows (CS3 and later) non-destructive filters applied on a per-layer basis.

Channel operations and masking are vastly superior to any competitor.

It works great on 8, 16 and 32 bit images in RGB or CMYK plus any RAW format variant you can throw at it.

It's functionally identical with an identical interface on Mac, Windows and SGI (remember them?).

It has brilliantly designed backward compatibility fallbacks written into the PSD format as they've appended to it over the years.

It has really amazing gif, png and jpg optimization routines built-in via save for web.

It's snappy, responsive and very thoughtfully laid out.

It runs natively on the Mac (instead of via X11), which happens to be where the majority of pro artists spend their time.

Bottom line is, it feels extremely organic to professional artists, has the best featureset, is installed on every freelance station you'll ever sit at, and it works straight out of the box with great documentation. It's the standard.

I check out Gimp, PaintshopPro or whatever about once a year to see how the most recent versions compare. They. Just. Don't. Not for real work, unless your time isn't worth anything.

Re:A question for large print graphics designers..

CMYK matters if anything you work with is ending up in print. On a press. Period. It also matters if files you receive for electronic images come to you in CMYK format. Like if you receive images that have been used in a professional capacity and need to adapt them for web use. Let's not even talk about hexa- or septachrome workflows.

It's not rubbish, it's how the industry works if you want enough control over your image to come out at a professional standard.

If you can't tell the difference, by all means, send RGB files and let the press operator use their best discretion in the conversion. I hold my work to a higher standard, and that's one thing that separates the pros from everyone else. We apply custom curves to give crushed, rich blacks (30%ish cyan mixed with 100% black or it will look weap and thin), we order matchprints, we look at our separations and we attend press checks.

Photoshop's default compression for gif, jpg and png all suck if you use Save As-> after manually indexing. Their save for web option, however, results in wonderful results if the image is suitable for the format you're trying to achieve.

Look, I've used the gimp a ton. I've used PS Pro a ton. For *basic* work, where color, workflow and clunkiness don't matter, they work as advertised. I'm not debating that. Lots of people can use either of those programs until the end of time because it fits their needs. I'm not debating that. But, what if I need to copy and paste? X11 to OS X? No go. Rough, rough, rough edges man. Basic functionality is missing without even breaching the high-end deficiencies.

If you work with RAW images, CMYK, are doing pro level retouching/compositing involving channel ops, detailed masking, fine selections, variable feathers on a selection, adding arbitrary spot color channels, working with HDRI... I could go on until the end of time, point being GIMP and PS Pro aren't even vaguely suitable for the task and Photoshop is an absolute joy to work with.

I guess the point I'm making is if you think GIMP does everything you want it to do, and you don't mind navigating the clunky interface, then great. You don't need Photoshop. It fits your needs.

It most certainly comes nowhere close to fitting mine. Let's agree to disagree on that point.

Was this a plug for a really crappy comic?

I guess the itty bitty little article on the history of Photoshop was all right, but the linked comic really stunk. Aside from lousy grammar and poor sentence flow, it just wasn't funny.

What did the Knolls Get?

A considerable empire and fortune have been built around PhotoShop. Adobe had sold 3,000,000 coppies by year 2000. I presume they have sold about as much since. I wonder how the creators were rewarded and what they think of the monster. Here are some questions the article raises but does not answer:

• Does PhotoShop still use the Knoll framework?
• Do they still contribute?
• How much of the profits did the Knoll brothers get?
• Do they think it was worth closing off?
• Do they approve of other Adobe/M$ licensing deals that keep secret importand details about the way cameras and scanners work.

I'm relatively sure they don't come around here and fanboy dis GIMP.

Re:What did the Knolls Get?

Tom Knoll works for Adobe and is still credited as a dev in the latest releases, and John Knoll is considered a giant in the VFX realm and still works at ILM (where he used Photoshop pre-1.0 to do matte paintings on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - I didn't RTFA, so I don't know if they mentioned that).

Apple category?

You know, it runs on Windows too.

Monopoly...

Adobe has definitely became a Monopoly in the computer graphics design field. It's mostly Adobe Photoshop for Mac vs Adobe Photoshop for Windows. Things like Corel Draw sort of just faded away.

Lets get real...

The warez scene made photoshop popular. Remember back in the land of dial up where you searched through dozens of websites to find a few that had working links to applications? Back then, there were dozens of warez webmasters competing for the coolest apps and Photoshop 4 was in vogue. This was significant because all those warez runners then used photoshop to make cool graphics for their sites. Other sites drooled and so photoshop spread. As the piracy grew so did the rep, as the rep grew so did the legitimate user base.

Not that adobe will admit rampant photoshop piracy has been the best thing that ever happened to them. The real reason they and other software leaders want to shut it down is that they don't any competitor taking that freeway to success. It is in the interest of market leaders to raise the bar to market entry as much as possible.

MacPaint

Back when Photoshop came out, it was like a Colour version of MacPaint.
Photoshop evolved and built on the ideas contained in MacPaint.

You can see this even today, where the most common tools in the
Photoshop tool palette came from the MacPaint Toolset:

- Marquee Tool
- Lasoo Tool
- Pencil Tool
- Eraser Tool
- Text Tool
- Hand Tool

they even had identical icon bitmaps
for the first several versions of Photoshop(!).

Re:MacPaint

Thing is that I find funny, that its taken 8 versions to have a Draw Circle Tool in Photoshop...The Amiga Dpaint had that from Day one.

Totally different apps. Even the titles give this away: Photoshop DPaint. Photoshop didn't have a draw circle because it's not a drawing or painting application - you would use Freehand or Illustrator for that. Photoshop is for the manipulation of pre-prepared images, and it is unrivalled at this.

Of course, whether you actually need its power rather depends on your line of work. Personally, I don't. iPhoto and Graphic Converter are plenty for me, though I'm keeping my eye on Pixelmator [pixelmator.com] as well. However, those tools are fine for the kind of minor photo retouching I do. To do the full Photoshop workflow I'm not kidding myself - Photoshop has no serious competitor in its field.

Cheers,
Ian

Juarez...

Just so y'all know, Photoshop Elements does about as much as most casual users of Photoshop need, and it's less than a Benjamin. /me is waiting for the next version of Elements which will be a Universal app based on CS3. Currently Photoshop Elements is at v.4 for Mac and v.5 for Windows. It currently has to run under Rosetta with MacIntel which makes Baby Jebus cry.

The Official Photoshop History - Honest

DON'T be fooled by cheap imatations, NO!

Russell Brown Comes Clean, Reveals All:

"Mr. Brown said in a phone call that he wanted to make a definitive statement regarding the "official story" behind Photoshop, its development by John and Thomas Knoll and exactly how it was acquired by Adobe Systems, Inc."

http://www.photoshopnews.com/2005/05/06/russell-br own-comes-clean [photoshopnews.com]

For the impatient:

http://video.photoshopnews.com/Official_Photoshop_ History.mov [photoshopnews.com]

Photoshop Splash Screens:

http://photoshopnews.com/feature-stories/photoshop -splash-screens/ [photoshopnews.com]

Who loves you baby?

Negative?

>>"Unfortunately, few commercial software companies did not see the point in Photoshop." And this didn't not not mean success for them at this stage?

Tom Knoll - still in Ann Arbor, still appreciated.

Tom and his wife are still in Ann Arbor - I understand they donated some digital video equipment to the Ann Arbor Chamber of Commerce last month. There is an elementary school in town called "Summers-Knoll" - apparently Tom had something to do with its genesis - I pass by it every day.

I love how Tom's story has a kind of Wozniak quality to it...

Why GIMP and $99 Pixelpusher don't cut it

Everytime Photoshop is mentioned here (or Indesign or Illusrtator for that matter), sooner or later someone will jump up and claim that the GIMP can do aynthing that Photoshop can and will then go on to make increasingly bizarre claims about how GIMP is going to support CMYK anyday now and (in the last Photoshop claim in the /. article by the guy who was looking for cheap alternatives to the Adobe suite), by some people even claiming that you don't need CMYK for print as sRGB is somehow better than the various ISO CMYK profiles worked out by industry professionals. I wonder if these people have ever heard of spot colours and how trying to emulate those in RGB for print is not going to work out too well. But to get back on topic...

Graphic professionals usually quote the quality CMYK workflows as the reason why PS is better than the GIMP, but in reality the reason is quality alone.

The Adobe applications have, IMHO, amongst the highest quality of any apps I've ever seen out there. The apps consistenly produce the same quality results throughout the suite. The interfaces are very well thought out (the big changes in CS3 are the biggest in 7 years) and Adobe reserves a lot of time for quality control which ensures that when I use one of their apps in my job (I use almost all of them, PS, AI, ID, Acrobat), I can be fairly certain that they won't crash and that the results will be acceptable for print and the web. Added to that Adobe really pays a great amount of attention to detail, such as the quality of scaled images, which while many others support bicubic scaling these days, almost none do it with the same quality as PS does. And the list goes on.

There's nothing wrong with the GIMP and it is a bloody amazing tool all things considered. But someone would have to pay the GIMP contributors to spend more time taking care of details in the app to bring it up to PS' quality.

Photostyler vs Photoshop

I was always under the impression that Aldus Photostyler was a predecessor to Photoshop--apparently it was a separate product and a competitor--this is surprising.

By the way, I _still_ use my copy of Aldus Photostyler 1.1 (1990 vintage) which fits on a floppy and has worked perfectly on every version of Windows (from 3.1 to XP Pro) without a hitch [except for the long filenames and the program's insistence on saving JPG files with a *.JIF extension, which I have taken care of with a hex editor]. It does everything important I'd want from Photoshop, and does so much faster.

I'd love to find out some day which developers were responsible for the code behind Photostyler (and what approach they used) to make it so robust...

Not even close to necessary

That Achewood strip was beyond lame.

Knew a Knoll, Some Fun Facts and Thoughts

I was in film school with John Knoll, who was really into special effects even then. At the time, there was no CGI, so many of PhotoShop's metaphors originated with the optical and photographic techniques used to perform, say, blue-screen traveling mattes. I remember seeing "this cool software my brother and I are working on" on a Mac II at ILM, doing a feathered, alpha-blended photo composite (giving a third eye to a photo of a baby) in the late 80s. At the time, the software was used to do background blending and stitching for CGI sequences in "The Abyss".

I have written on professional computer graphics software in the last few years, use the GIMP regularly in my applications-development work, and think PhotoShop still kicks it all 'round the block for fit and finish as well as raw capability. I agree with the earlier comments on Clayton Christensen, but don't think a product that tries to duplicate the market leader is the important one. I'd say perhaps that Picasa would be a better example there, quietly chomping away at the low end of PhotoShop's features for crop, scale, rotate, color-correct etc.

Re:It is the 'killer app'

Historically, PhotoShop was a mac app. Dual monitor support, video editing, page layout, graphic design were all easier on a Macintosh than a windows box. Until Windows NT/2K, the OS wasn't stable enough -- at which point MacOS became second tier.

Re:Is achewood supposed to be funny?

Whereas you are! Wheres +1 "Couldnt't get it even if I tried"?

Re:on macs:

Um, what?