14 ms·

20 Years of Adobe Photoshop

72 points by jasim 9y ago

CharlesW 9y ago
Wow! I just checked out the copyrights[1] for Photoshop CC, and Photoshop still uses a (a heavily-customized) MacApp![2][3] [1] https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/photoshop-copyright-trademarks-third-party-notices.html https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/photoshop-copyright-tradem... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/13/3959868/photoshop-is-a-city-for-everyone-how-adobe-endlessly-rebuilds-its https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/13/3959868/photoshop-is-a-ci... [3] http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2013/3/30_Building_Photoshop.html http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...
- doomlaser 9y ago
  I just learned the other day that QuickDraw still ships in High Sierra. They just don't ship the headers in the SDK. There must be bits of Carbon/QuickDraw functionality still shipping in corners of important apps. Pretty impressive for a graphics API that began in 1979 in Pascal and 68k assembly.
21 9y ago
> On February 19, 2010, Adobe Photoshop turned 20 years old. Wouldn't that make it 27 years of PS? That's quite some rounding going on in the title.
- _frog 9y ago
  Judging by where the article ends, I’m assuming this was published originally in early 2010
  - tehabe 9y ago
    It says "Updated March 03, 2017" But who knows what has been updated.
  - colejohnson66 9y ago
    Not to mention that it stops at CS4 and not CC
tehabe 9y ago
What is still weird to me is this: Photoshop can't be used on a case-sensitive partition.
- userbinator 9y ago
  What's weirder still, is that fixing such a bug is unlikely to be very difficult --- I've had to port some Windows software to case-sensitive Linux, encountered the same problem, and fixed it by essentially making sure all the filenames it uses were consistent. No one seems to have had a go at doing this on the Photoshop binaries, or if someone has, certainly hasn't published anything about it.
moondev 9y ago
Seeing all those splash screens hits me with some nastalgia! First one I remember was Photoshop 6.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  I had a pirated version of Photoshop 4.0 off of Hotline (because every self-respecting teen had to have Photoshop), but I never actually used it until I purchased CS3 (in a boxed copy!) for work. Before that I used a Mac shareware program called "Color IT!" that always seemed far more intuitive to me.
- sebazzz 9y ago
  My first memory is of Photoshop 1.0 - that eye does ring a bell. My father had a old square Macintosh computer that ran it. I also remember there was some game on it, a 2d train simulator.
jansho 9y ago
I still miss the time when I didn’t have to subscribe to Adobe Creative suite...
- AmVess 9y ago
  I had to give up. I got tired of the CC app itself breaking and requiring reinstall way too often. And this is on two different platforms! To uninstall, I had to get an uninstaller for the uninstaller because it broke. I got the trial for Affinity Photo and bought it after using it for a few days on both Windows and Mac. It doesn't have the pure power of Photoshop, but it's 95% there for my amateur use. Only $50 and I put it on all my home computers for that $50. The sub for Photoshop is cheap, but all the anti-theft crap they have baked into it makes it a royal PITA to use. This is the first time since PS 5.0 that I haven't had PS installed on anything at all.
  - xmichael99 9y ago
    Cool stuff, never heard of Affinity Photo but looks great! You likely created a new customer for them!
  - jansho 9y ago
    /rant I do contract work and it’s ridiculous that some clients specifically request for graphics to be done on Adobe. When there are a myriad of other options now, like Affinity as you suggested, and Inkscape which I happen to prefer over Illustrator. And sometimes ad-hoc methods like online gif generators and filters are all you need for a simple job.
    - AmVess 9y ago
      I'd stick with PS if I were using it in a professional manner simly because it is the standard. Affinity Photo is perfect for me because it does 95% of what I want, and it has really good .psd support so all those gigs of .psds that I have can still be used. It is the first photo app that I'm happy with instead of using PS. Sure, it has some warts here and there, and it's not as fast a PS...but Adobe has quite a long lead on them. They've done an admirable job catching up as much as they have, and they are constantly developing it, too. It has a 10-day trial which is a healthy chunk of time to get used to it. I've been using PS since version 5, and I felt comfortable with Affinity Photo after a few hours. I'm not a professional, nor am I a hardcore PS user, but I am very familiar with it. 0 regrets switching so far.
Theodores 9y ago
I liked the proliferation of other tools that existed back in the day, things like the Kai's Power Tools plugin for Photoshop. Some products such as Paint Shop Pro had the edge on Photoshop with features such as being able to read more images and have a finer control of what gets saved. In some industries Photoshop was seen as just a toy. If you had an SGI workstation and you paid $40K a year to Avid to run Matador then you didn't look on Photoshop as a serious thing (it was priced at 1% of the price of the pro tools plus you needed a machine that only cost 10-20% of what your workstation cost). Photoshop broke down this barrier to entry as did After Effects. There were good reasons to run the pirated version of Photoshop even if you owned the paid for version. Before the cut down versions of Photoshop came along you could buy a ridiculously cheap flatbed scanner that came with a legitimate full version of Photoshop. Then you could upgrade that to the next version that came along. That was how I ended up with a legitimate copy of Photoshop for so many years. Then I discovered things like inline SVG graphics and imageMagick. If you are working on the web then there are so much better creative tools to be working with than the desktop publishing applications of the 1990's.
- Keyframe 9y ago
  I had an SGI and ran Photoshop on it. Weird time to remember, because Photoshop back then didn't have layers even! Last version on IRIX had them, but we were already looking at those sweet Windows boxes. As for seriousness of it - I don't remember anyone not considering it a serious software. Barco Creator was considered serious and Photoshop was disruptive.
- GlennS 9y ago
  It's sort of in the opposite direction, but I like Paint.NET as a free Photoshop replacement. It's not nearly as featureful (as far as I know), but it's much faster, crashes less, and is vastly easier to use.
  - nasredin 9y ago
    Paint.NET requires... .NET. Allow me to help you... FastStone Capture AKA FSCapture It is the BEST screenshot capture program (I literally have tried them all) It also includes an image editor that I've used thousands of times. It is small, cheap and portable (keep it on your USB drive). One of the few programs I have bought.
elorant 9y ago
I avoid installing anything from Adobe like the plague. Their software is the shittiest I've come across with awkward UI and a need to update every week or so.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
  Have you used Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom?
  - elorant 9y ago
    I've used both. Photoshop is stellar, but you need a very powerful rig. Lightroom doesn't make any sense at all. It's like it ignores your file system and tries to handle files its own way. Thank God I'm a programmer and I can afford not using any of them.
- johncalvinyoung 9y ago
  Seriously? Some of their apps are rock-solid professional apps with good UX and (occasionally) no serious competitors. InDesign alone is a huge win.
BeetleB 9y ago
Kind of sad that Photoshop introduced adjustment layers in 1996, and Gimp still doesn't have it. It's really a major feature preventing people from using Gimp.
- kakarot 9y ago
  It really blows my mind that GIMP doesn't have these yet. I've been using GIMP for almost 15 years and things like adjustment layers and better tablet support are the only reasons I have to use Photoshop for any heavy or experimental work. I know with a project like GIMP your time is better spent making pull requests than making complaints, but I don't have the time and knowledge myself to contribute the features I feel are missing.
  - lkerrekfjk 9y ago
    AFAIK they are using C + Gobject which doesn't help finding new contributors.
  - shmerl 9y ago
    Non destructive editing is in their TODO list for version 3.2. And for tablets, Krita is pretty good.
doomlaser 9y ago
It's amazing how much of Photoshop's basic architecture descended directly from Bill Atkinson's 1984 MacPaint for the original Macintosh — from the window layout, toolbar palette, to many of the basic tool functions, bitmap zooming, even the icons. MacPaint: http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/MacPaint-screenshot.gif http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/MacPaint-... PhotoShop: https://elektronikgrafik.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/photoshop1.png https://elektronikgrafik.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/photosh...
- dr_zoidberg 9y ago
  Windows 3.1 paint had a very similar layout[0], probably "inspired" on MacPaint. [0] http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/Windows-Vista-Paint-Adobe-Photoshop-CS3-Killer-3.png http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/Windows-Vis...
BuildTheRobots 9y ago
Any history of photoshop is incomplete without this programmers hilarious and insightful comments/breakdown as he attempts to parse it [1] [1] https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/master/XeePhotoshopLoader.m#L108 https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/master/XeePhotoshopLoader.m#...
- Nition 9y ago
  Any chance it's that ridiculous on purpose, to make it hard to implement in competing software?
  - 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
    I think it's much more likely that it's an accumulation of "seemed like a good idea at the time" hacks, perhaps combined with nobody actually being in charge of the overall file format. On older computers, you could sometimes save significant save/load time and/or memory overhead by just dumping the in-memory structures/buffers to disk instead of having a nice serialization format/layer. Imagine what a file format looks like if a developer does this every time a new feature needs its own data in the file, for 20 years.
  - zerr 9y ago
    I think this is also true for PDF.
aerovistae 9y ago
This would have been so much more interesting if it had shown how the UI evolved over the years instead of the box art.
wallflower 9y ago
Every time I see Photoshop, I look for the launch/splash screen to see Thomas Knoll's name at the very beginning of the long list of credited names. Without the software craftsmanship and skill of the Knoll brothers, there might not have been the dynasty of Photoshop. http://www.drdobbs.com/a-conversation-with-john-knoll/184410606 http://www.drdobbs.com/a-conversation-with-john-knoll/184410...
jimmies 9y ago
I am normally a FOSS guy, but I have to give credits to Photoshop. I dabbled in retro hardware lately and I am using an iBook running on OS 9 with Photoshop 5.0. It's unbelievably powerful and most everything you want a competent image editor is there. I can still edit my modern pictures with what is provided in the program and it's really quick too. Oh, and what's more... You can run an even earlier of Photopshop, I think as high as 4.0 or something on classic-classic Macs, which have freaking Motorola 68k processors. I think the only feature I miss is editoable text layers. It's pretty darn amazing - if you don't have one, try running the thing on the emulator - Basilisk II. No wonder the original authors boasted it as "High Performance Mac software." It's pretty freaking fantastic.
- bluedino 9y ago
  It's funny to hear people these days ask if the 12" MacBook can handle Photoshop or if the maxed out 15" MacBook Pro is needed. We used Photoshop in the old days on 300MHz G3's with 64MB to do all the production work we do now. Sure, image effects can be rendered in real-time instead of waiting 20 seconds, everything is faster, it doesn't take five minutes to load a hundred images... The editable text layers in 5.0 was the feature that I missed most whenever I had to go back to a machine with 4.0
roschdal 9y ago
I much prefer to use GIMP! https://www.gimp.org/ https://www.gimp.org/
Samahaly 9y ago
The development of photoshop over the years is very impressive But autodesk is becoming powerful in some softwares too. So the question is: Photoshop or Autodesk? If you are interested you can read about it here: https://www.arch2o.com/adobe-or-autodesk/ https://www.arch2o.com/adobe-or-autodesk/
DanielLee888 9y ago
Can't believe I am so old, because I started using it since it's first. It is incredible how much Photoshop had grown during these years, there are so many additional tools and other features already. Here are my favorite free Photoshop gradient sets https://www.templatemonster.com/blog/free-photoshop-gradient-sets/ https://www.templatemonster.com/blog/free-photoshop-gradient... .

72 points by jasim 9y ago

Wow! I just checked out the copyrights[1] for Photoshop CC, and Photoshop still uses a (a heavily-customized) MacApp![2][3] [1] https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/photoshop-copyright-trademarks-third-party-notices.html https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/photoshop-copyright-tradem... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/13/3959868/photoshop-is-a-city-for-everyone-how-adobe-endlessly-rebuilds-its https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/13/3959868/photoshop-is-a-ci... [3] http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2013/3/30_Building_Photoshop.html http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...

doomlaser 9y ago
I just learned the other day that QuickDraw still ships in High Sierra. They just don't ship the headers in the SDK. There must be bits of Carbon/QuickDraw functionality still shipping in corners of important apps. Pretty impressive for a graphics API that began in 1979 in Pascal and 68k assembly.

21 9y ago

> On February 19, 2010, Adobe Photoshop turned 20 years old. Wouldn't that make it 27 years of PS? That's quite some rounding going on in the title.

_frog 9y ago
Judging by where the article ends, I’m assuming this was published originally in early 2010
- tehabe 9y ago
  It says "Updated March 03, 2017" But who knows what has been updated.
- colejohnson66 9y ago
  Not to mention that it stops at CS4 and not CC

tehabe 9y ago

What is still weird to me is this: Photoshop can't be used on a case-sensitive partition.

userbinator 9y ago
What's weirder still, is that fixing such a bug is unlikely to be very difficult --- I've had to port some Windows software to case-sensitive Linux, encountered the same problem, and fixed it by essentially making sure all the filenames it uses were consistent. No one seems to have had a go at doing this on the Photoshop binaries, or if someone has, certainly hasn't published anything about it.

moondev 9y ago

Seeing all those splash screens hits me with some nastalgia! First one I remember was Photoshop 6.

kalleboo 9y ago
I had a pirated version of Photoshop 4.0 off of Hotline (because every self-respecting teen had to have Photoshop), but I never actually used it until I purchased CS3 (in a boxed copy!) for work. Before that I used a Mac shareware program called "Color IT!" that always seemed far more intuitive to me.
sebazzz 9y ago
My first memory is of Photoshop 1.0 - that eye does ring a bell. My father had a old square Macintosh computer that ran it. I also remember there was some game on it, a 2d train simulator.

jansho 9y ago

I still miss the time when I didn’t have to subscribe to Adobe Creative suite...

AmVess 9y ago
I had to give up. I got tired of the CC app itself breaking and requiring reinstall way too often. And this is on two different platforms! To uninstall, I had to get an uninstaller for the uninstaller because it broke. I got the trial for Affinity Photo and bought it after using it for a few days on both Windows and Mac. It doesn't have the pure power of Photoshop, but it's 95% there for my amateur use. Only $50 and I put it on all my home computers for that $50. The sub for Photoshop is cheap, but all the anti-theft crap they have baked into it makes it a royal PITA to use. This is the first time since PS 5.0 that I haven't had PS installed on anything at all.
- xmichael99 9y ago
  Cool stuff, never heard of Affinity Photo but looks great! You likely created a new customer for them!
- jansho 9y ago
  /rant I do contract work and it’s ridiculous that some clients specifically request for graphics to be done on Adobe. When there are a myriad of other options now, like Affinity as you suggested, and Inkscape which I happen to prefer over Illustrator. And sometimes ad-hoc methods like online gif generators and filters are all you need for a simple job.
  - AmVess 9y ago
    I'd stick with PS if I were using it in a professional manner simly because it is the standard. Affinity Photo is perfect for me because it does 95% of what I want, and it has really good .psd support so all those gigs of .psds that I have can still be used. It is the first photo app that I'm happy with instead of using PS. Sure, it has some warts here and there, and it's not as fast a PS...but Adobe has quite a long lead on them. They've done an admirable job catching up as much as they have, and they are constantly developing it, too. It has a 10-day trial which is a healthy chunk of time to get used to it. I've been using PS since version 5, and I felt comfortable with Affinity Photo after a few hours. I'm not a professional, nor am I a hardcore PS user, but I am very familiar with it. 0 regrets switching so far.

Theodores 9y ago

I liked the proliferation of other tools that existed back in the day, things like the Kai's Power Tools plugin for Photoshop. Some products such as Paint Shop Pro had the edge on Photoshop with features such as being able to read more images and have a finer control of what gets saved. In some industries Photoshop was seen as just a toy. If you had an SGI workstation and you paid $40K a year to Avid to run Matador then you didn't look on Photoshop as a serious thing (it was priced at 1% of the price of the pro tools plus you needed a machine that only cost 10-20% of what your workstation cost). Photoshop broke down this barrier to entry as did After Effects. There were good reasons to run the pirated version of Photoshop even if you owned the paid for version. Before the cut down versions of Photoshop came along you could buy a ridiculously cheap flatbed scanner that came with a legitimate full version of Photoshop. Then you could upgrade that to the next version that came along. That was how I ended up with a legitimate copy of Photoshop for so many years. Then I discovered things like inline SVG graphics and imageMagick. If you are working on the web then there are so much better creative tools to be working with than the desktop publishing applications of the 1990's.

Keyframe 9y ago
I had an SGI and ran Photoshop on it. Weird time to remember, because Photoshop back then didn't have layers even! Last version on IRIX had them, but we were already looking at those sweet Windows boxes. As for seriousness of it - I don't remember anyone not considering it a serious software. Barco Creator was considered serious and Photoshop was disruptive.
GlennS 9y ago
It's sort of in the opposite direction, but I like Paint.NET as a free Photoshop replacement. It's not nearly as featureful (as far as I know), but it's much faster, crashes less, and is vastly easier to use.
- nasredin 9y ago
  Paint.NET requires... .NET. Allow me to help you... FastStone Capture AKA FSCapture It is the BEST screenshot capture program (I literally have tried them all) It also includes an image editor that I've used thousands of times. It is small, cheap and portable (keep it on your USB drive). One of the few programs I have bought.

elorant 9y ago

I avoid installing anything from Adobe like the plague. Their software is the shittiest I've come across with awkward UI and a need to update every week or so.

kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
Have you used Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom?
- elorant 9y ago
  I've used both. Photoshop is stellar, but you need a very powerful rig. Lightroom doesn't make any sense at all. It's like it ignores your file system and tries to handle files its own way. Thank God I'm a programmer and I can afford not using any of them.
johncalvinyoung 9y ago
Seriously? Some of their apps are rock-solid professional apps with good UX and (occasionally) no serious competitors. InDesign alone is a huge win.

BeetleB 9y ago

Kind of sad that Photoshop introduced adjustment layers in 1996, and Gimp still doesn't have it. It's really a major feature preventing people from using Gimp.

kakarot 9y ago
It really blows my mind that GIMP doesn't have these yet. I've been using GIMP for almost 15 years and things like adjustment layers and better tablet support are the only reasons I have to use Photoshop for any heavy or experimental work. I know with a project like GIMP your time is better spent making pull requests than making complaints, but I don't have the time and knowledge myself to contribute the features I feel are missing.
- lkerrekfjk 9y ago
  AFAIK they are using C + Gobject which doesn't help finding new contributors.
- shmerl 9y ago
  Non destructive editing is in their TODO list for version 3.2. And for tablets, Krita is pretty good.

doomlaser 9y ago

It's amazing how much of Photoshop's basic architecture descended directly from Bill Atkinson's 1984 MacPaint for the original Macintosh — from the window layout, toolbar palette, to many of the basic tool functions, bitmap zooming, even the icons. MacPaint: http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/MacPaint-screenshot.gif http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/MacPaint-... PhotoShop: https://elektronikgrafik.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/photoshop1.png https://elektronikgrafik.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/photosh...

dr_zoidberg 9y ago
Windows 3.1 paint had a very similar layout[0], probably "inspired" on MacPaint. [0] http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/Windows-Vista-Paint-Adobe-Photoshop-CS3-Killer-3.png http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/Windows-Vis...

BuildTheRobots 9y ago

Any history of photoshop is incomplete without this programmers hilarious and insightful comments/breakdown as he attempts to parse it [1] [1] https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/master/XeePhotoshopLoader.m#L108 https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/master/XeePhotoshopLoader.m#...

Nition 9y ago
Any chance it's that ridiculous on purpose, to make it hard to implement in competing software?
- 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
  I think it's much more likely that it's an accumulation of "seemed like a good idea at the time" hacks, perhaps combined with nobody actually being in charge of the overall file format. On older computers, you could sometimes save significant save/load time and/or memory overhead by just dumping the in-memory structures/buffers to disk instead of having a nice serialization format/layer. Imagine what a file format looks like if a developer does this every time a new feature needs its own data in the file, for 20 years.
- zerr 9y ago
  I think this is also true for PDF.

aerovistae 9y ago

This would have been so much more interesting if it had shown how the UI evolved over the years instead of the box art.

wallflower 9y ago

Every time I see Photoshop, I look for the launch/splash screen to see Thomas Knoll's name at the very beginning of the long list of credited names. Without the software craftsmanship and skill of the Knoll brothers, there might not have been the dynasty of Photoshop. http://www.drdobbs.com/a-conversation-with-john-knoll/184410606 http://www.drdobbs.com/a-conversation-with-john-knoll/184410...

jimmies 9y ago

I am normally a FOSS guy, but I have to give credits to Photoshop. I dabbled in retro hardware lately and I am using an iBook running on OS 9 with Photoshop 5.0. It's unbelievably powerful and most everything you want a competent image editor is there. I can still edit my modern pictures with what is provided in the program and it's really quick too. Oh, and what's more... You can run an even earlier of Photopshop, I think as high as 4.0 or something on classic-classic Macs, which have freaking Motorola 68k processors. I think the only feature I miss is editoable text layers. It's pretty darn amazing - if you don't have one, try running the thing on the emulator - Basilisk II. No wonder the original authors boasted it as "High Performance Mac software." It's pretty freaking fantastic.

bluedino 9y ago
It's funny to hear people these days ask if the 12" MacBook can handle Photoshop or if the maxed out 15" MacBook Pro is needed. We used Photoshop in the old days on 300MHz G3's with 64MB to do all the production work we do now. Sure, image effects can be rendered in real-time instead of waiting 20 seconds, everything is faster, it doesn't take five minutes to load a hundred images... The editable text layers in 5.0 was the feature that I missed most whenever I had to go back to a machine with 4.0

roschdal 9y ago

I much prefer to use GIMP! https://www.gimp.org/ https://www.gimp.org/

Samahaly 9y ago

The development of photoshop over the years is very impressive But autodesk is becoming powerful in some softwares too. So the question is: Photoshop or Autodesk? If you are interested you can read about it here: https://www.arch2o.com/adobe-or-autodesk/ https://www.arch2o.com/adobe-or-autodesk/

DanielLee888 9y ago

Can't believe I am so old, because I started using it since it's first. It is incredible how much Photoshop had grown during these years, there are so many additional tools and other features already. Here are my favorite free Photoshop gradient sets https://www.templatemonster.com/blog/free-photoshop-gradient-sets/ https://www.templatemonster.com/blog/free-photoshop-gradient... .