We hear a lot about major milestones for computer companies and operating systems but other software applications rarely get noticed. Unless, of course, that software happens to be Adobe Photoshop.
The venerable graphics tool is celebrating its 20th birthday today and never have I felt so old! Though I don’t remember version 1.0 released in 1990, 3.0 later versions have been part of my arsenal since I first started puttering around on Macs in the early 1990’s.
The great thing about Photoshop is that you don’t have to be a graphics expert to use it – and this certainly describes me! If, like me all you need to do is basic image cropping and re-touching, Photoshop is easy to use while still catering to expert users and has never strayed from that path.
According to Thomas Knoll, one of Photoshop’s creators, “Twenty years ago, Adobe predicted that it would sell 500 copies of Photoshop per month”. “I guess you could say, we beat those projections! It’s amazing to think that millions of people use this software today. We knew we had a groundbreaking technology on our hands, but we never anticipated how much it would impact the images we see all around us. The ability to seamlessly place someone within an image was just the beginning of Photoshop’s magic.”
Happy birthday and here’s to another 20 years!