Adobe is celebrating the 25th anniversary of Photoshop. The popular photo editing software initially launched as a Mac-only application, back on February 19, 1990.
What went on to become the industry standard image editing app started life in 1987, when John Knoll, a computer vision doctorate student at the University of Michigan, began developing it on his Mac Plus.
First known as Display, the app was first designed to simply display grayscale images on the Macintosh’s black and white monitor. You could say the app has come a long way since then.
“Today, the digital imaging revolution that Photoshop started is so pervasive that remembering a time before it existed takes some work. So it’s with great pleasure, on Photoshop’s 25th anniversary, that we look back to the simpler, pre-millennial world into which it was born, not to celebrate the past but to recognize what an awesome transformation our world has undergone in such a short amount of time.”
Mashable has a great collection of videos showcasing Photoshop, and there is a very nice piece covering the history of the app on the Amateur Photographer site, which shares the first ever image edited in Photoshop: A photo of John Knoll’s then-girlfriend and later wife, Jennifer.
When was the first time you used Photoshop? Sadly, our virgin experience with Photoshop was on a Windows machine. We still feel a little dirty about that…
