Adobe is celebrating the 25th anniversary of Photoshop, the most famous and most used photo editing software ever.
Photoshop has had a long history of updates. In fact, you might not recognize the first version of the software.
The origins of Photoshop date back to when Tom Knoll wanted to showcase grayscale images on his monochrome display, which was on his Macintosh Plus. It was then suggested that he should turn this program, which he called "Display," into a full image-editing program.
The first known version of the software was released in 1988. Of course, a 1988 release would make Photoshop 27 years old. However, this version wasn't released to the public, even though it was the first known version of the software, being version 0.07.
September 1989 was when Adobe bought Photoshop. At the time, the creators of Photoshop had been in talks with both Supermac and Aldus, which were other software companies. Both, however, turned down the deal, eventually leading to a deal between Photoshop and Adobe. This would be huge for both companies, launching them into success.
After a couple of other in-progress versions, Photoshop 1.0 was finally released to the public in 1990. At the time, it cost around $300 per hour for photo retouching.
Photoshop eventually became one of the first cross-platform software, with a Windows version being released in November 1992.
Another milestone came in Photoshop version 5.5, which allowed users to "Save for web." What this essentially meant was that users could export their images in a format and quality that would be appropriate for the slow web speeds of the time.
Version 6.0 was also rather significant, adding support for vector shapes. This feature was very well received by users of Photoshop because of the fact that vector images use points and lines rather than pixels. This allows vector-based images to be much more clear when zoomed in.
Next up was version 7.0, which introduced a number of new tools in the brush palette, including the healing brush tool and the ability to create custom brushes. One of the biggest new features, however, was introduced in version 7.0.1 with the addition of Raw 1.x support. Raw photos are essentially completely uncompressed images, allowing for all the data captured by the camera to be shown. While this makes for the best image quality, it also leads to huge file sizes.
Photoshop is currently at version 15.0, known as Creative Cloud 2014. Photoshop is now a subscription-based service, allowing users to pay a monthly fee rather than the hundreds of dollars for the software outright.
Photoshop continues to be the most revered and dominant image-editing service, showing no signs of stopping. Its past has laid a great framework for its future, as it continues to add support for new versions of Raw photos, among other important features.
