Photoshop | The First Demo (1990)

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", and "photoshop contest") although Adobe discourages such use.

Photoshop can edit and compose raster images in multiple layers and supports masks, alpha compositing and several color models including RGB, CMYK, CIELAB, spot color, and duotone. Photoshop uses its own PSD and PSB file formats to support these features. In addition to raster graphics, Photoshop has limited abilities to edit or render text and vector graphics (especially through clipping path for the latter), as well as 3D graphics and video.

Its feature set can be expanded by plug-ins; programs developed and distributed independently of Photoshop that run inside it and offer new or enhanced features.

Early history

Photoshop was developed in 1987 by two brothers Thomas and John Knoll, who sold the distribution license to Adobe Systems Incorporated in 1988.

Thomas Knoll, a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display. This program (at that time called Display) caught the attention of his brother John, an Industrial Light & Magic employee, who recommended that Thomas turn it into a full-fledged image editing program.

Thomas took a six-month break from his studies in 1988 to collaborate with his brother on the program. Thomas renamed the program ImagePro, but the name was already taken. Later that year, Thomas renamed his program Photoshop and worked out a short-term deal with scanner manufacturer Barneyscan to distribute copies of the program with a slide scanner; a "total of about 200 copies of Photoshop were shipped" this way.

During this time, John traveled to Silicon Valley and gave a demonstration of the program to engineers at Apple and Russell Brown, art director at Adobe. Both showings were successful, and Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute in September 1988. While John worked on plug-ins in California, Thomas remained in Ann Arbor writing code.

Photoshop 1.0 was released on February 19, 1990, for Macintosh exclusively. The Barneyscan version included advanced color editing features that were stripped from the first Adobe shipped version. The handling of color slowly improved with each release from Adobe and Photoshop quickly became the industry standard in digital color editing.

At the time Photoshop 1.0 was released, digital retouching on dedicated high-end systems (such as the Scitex) cost around $300 an hour for basic photo retouching. The list price of Photoshop 1.0 for Macintosh in 1990 was $895.

Photoshop was initially only available on Macintosh. In 1993, Adobe chief architect Seetharaman Narayanan ported Photoshop to Microsoft Windows. The Windows port led to Photoshop reaching a wider mass market audience as Microsoft's global reach expanded within the next few years.

On March 31, 1995, Adobe purchased the rights for Photoshop from Thomas and John Knoll for $34.5 million so Adobe would no longer need to pay a royalty for each copy sold.