The French Photographer Weblog

February 18th 2010 marked the 20th anniversary of the release of Photoshop. This is probably the piece of software most used by photographers over the last 20 years so I wanted to mark the event by reminding you of the story of this marvel of photo editing.
Here we go for the first 20 years of the story of Photoshop.

1987 – The story actually starts with version 0.67. Thomas Knoll wrote this version on a Mac Plus at home as a side project (he was than working on his doctorate). in 1988 about 200 copies of version 0.87 of Photoshop are distributed with scanners distributed by a company named Barneyscan. The company will later be bought by Pixelcraft, a subsidiary of Xerox, in 1993.
They still deserve the credit to have been the first to believe in the relevance of Photoshop.
In April of 1989, Adobe will be presented with a more finalized version and a distribution agreement will be signed between the Knoll brothers and Russel Brown and John Warnock of Adobe.

February 1990 – this agreement leads to the introduction of Photoshop 1.0. The major features are curves and levels (already), color corrections, image optimization and the clone tool.

June 1991 – Photoshop 2.0 adds support for CMYK, paths, rasterization of ESP files and a pen tool.

February 1993 – Version 2.5 adds palettes, support for 16 bits files and in April Adobe releases the first Windows version (2.5). For 3 years Photoshop has been a software for Mac only.
1993 – Photoshop 3.0 is released in September for Mac and November for Windows. Major new features – the layers.

1994 – a year later, in November version 4.0 brings non-destructive photo editing thanks to adjustments layers and automation with the actions.
So as you can see non destructive photo editing is not exactly a new concept.

May 1998 – Version 5.0 adds the editable text fields, the lasso tool, the history palette (multiple undos) and Photoshop now supports ICC profiles.
At this point Adobe will starts the cycle of one new version about every 18 months.

July 1999 – Photoshop 5.5 includes Image Ready 2.0 and the ’save for web’ command.

October 2000 – An updated user interface is introduced with Photoshop 6.0. It brings vector shapes, layer styles, blending options and the liquify filter.

April 2002 – 18 months later, version 7.0 introduces the well appreciated healing brush and a few other refinements (file browser, new painting engine).

2003 – We have to wait another 18 months but in February Adobe becomes the first software manufacturer to support the RAW photo format. Version 7.0.1 is a small increment but a big step in digital photography.
In October this feature becomes part of Photoshop CS improvements with the real time histogram, new slice tool, hierarchical layer groups and match color command (among many other improvements).

April 2005 – With Creative Suite version 2 (CS2) Photoshop comes with Bridge 1.0 and a lot of new tools and features – spot healing brush (I’m still not convinced of the relevance of this one), red eyes tool, lens correction smart guides, support for HDR, vanishing point and the very valuable smart objects.

April 2007 – Photoshop CS3 for Mac now support natively Intel processorsit also includes smart filters, automatic layer alignment and blending, refine edges tool.

October 2008 – Version CS4 bring the product to a new level of sophistication with advanced tools like content aware scaling (if you have never seen that feature look at the examples video on Adobe web site). The interface of the Mac and windows version are now identical. It’s a very mature product.

Soon – April 2010 – CS5 is coming soon and we already know that one of the major improvement will be a 64 bit entirely rewritten version for Mac. Adobe finally converted Photoshop to Cocoa (the native Mac toolbox) after being criticized for taking so long to make the switch. This should bring a new level of performance and stability.
Although I’m honestly surprised that a software as sophisticated and rich as Photoshop suffers from relatively very little bugs. It’s well known that there is no bug free software development, so it’s pretty amazing that a product which is now 20 years old and has evolved through so many stages turn out to be so remarkably stable.

To finish with a touch of nostalgia, this is the icon of version 0.67 back from 1988.

and the about box.

Oh BTW, Thomas Knoll cannot be reached anymore at this number.

Maybe this time it will work better !
As i said in a post a few weeks ago I wanted to really start to contribute to this blog.
That was until I tried to work with blogger. what a pain. So I changed my strategy and now I switched to Wordpress and I’m hosting my how blog on my own domain – laurentcavalie.com
Ah not only it works much much better and the updates are much easier but…. it feels like home.
So you might definitely see some posts now.

With more things coming into place I hope i will be able to contribute more often and regularly to this blog. I have quite a few subjects i would like to post about, so let’s go.

After posting here and there different things I finally decided to settle down and start my real personal weblog about my business and life events.
So here it is.
And as it has to start somewhere this is the first post.
Not fascinated so far ? Well, let’s hope it will get better.