The Photoshop

It seems that one of the hardest things anyone can do is to try to place themselves in time. We tend to remember new technology as better than it was, earlier than it was. Crack open a box of Photoshop today and you might think we have been editing images with a program like this for years. Well, we have. Sort of.

Sit down. Photoshop is twenty years old, today. February 10th, 2010 marks twenty years for the venerable image editor. It wasn’t the first. It wasn’t always the best. But over time it solved more problems than it created for more people and so it’s here today, while ImageReady and PhotoPaint and many others have receded into the middle distance, somewhere.

As a Web professional, it’s hard for me to imagine life without Photoshop. I have nearly always worked collaboratively with others—even in the early days. So I didn’t actually need to join the Photoshop parade until v3 came about. Originally, it was just scanner software, and I didn’t own a scanner. Store-bought versions of Photoshop were always expensive, and even un-bundled from scanner hardware I had a hard time justifying it with my humble needs. I was scrambling to learn the newness baked into HTML v3.2 and the differences between various Web browsers and was probably dabbling a little in JavaScript or Flash. I had friends I could lean on for scans and edits, so it took me a few years to get involved. I finally picked up my own copy in 1995, as Photoshop v3.0.

Photoshop v3 shipped in a big, heavy Cube of Value, the way all of the good software came back in those days. It was loaded with manuals I never understood and shipped on too many floppy disks. I don’t even remember, now, installing it on my Macintosh LC/II. It had to have taken an hour, though. Maybe more. The Big Thing back then was layers. Like the old Disney animators, we could now work on images built from several composite cells, stacking them as necessary and even building humble animations just as they did in the 1930s. Pretty cool stuff, for its day. There was a lot to learn, but I really only needed to know .gif and .jpg files and maybe how to edit-out lamp posts or clouds or people in the background.

When v4 shipped, I bought it in the new-fangled CD-ROM format. That whole cube of floppies now shipped on just a single CD. Man, the future was going to be sooo cool! It was a tremendous time-saver, or would have been if I had not upgraded. See, when my Mac crashed and I had to rebuild everything, I had to first go through the process of loading up all of those floppies, and only then was able to upgrade v3 to v4 specification. A call to a sympathetic Adobe rep got me a new-install key instead of an upgrade key for the same CD and I that I used from then on.

Over the years, Photoshop has suffered its share of feature bloat, but unlike, say, Microsoft Word, Photoshop features have almost always been at least somewhat relevant to me and to my work. As the 1990s drew to a close, v5 came with some terrific advances in type handling. It was now easier to place and edit words on an image. v5.5 came out soon after with its Save For Web feature. Now you could quickly fine-tune images in either popular Web format, and see what the results would be on-screen, before you committed to either.

I’m now in that comfortable saddle of the learning curve, where you know a base of umpteen features and options and only have to learn the new things, the differences, in each new version of Photoshop. I suspect it will always be a daunting project, learning the program. Adobe even recognized this some time ago, releasing a de-contented version for people who just need to crop snapshots, edit “Red Eye” and a few other details.

Like the end of a movie, Photoshop has always had credits. Adobe have always been proud of their developers. You got to spend quite a bit of time with the splash screen, while listening to your disk drive grinding, wondering who all those folks were. Some have come and gone, but the core is a single family. I don’t know of any other software like that. We owe the Knolls a lot.

Twenty years. Photoshop. It doesn’t seem possible, to me.