The image editing tool has been one of the staples of the computer world since the early 1990s, and its popularity can be traced back to what is now known as Adobe Photoshop. Originally released as a third-party app for macOS, this tool allows untrained users to easily manipulate and edit digital images. Although many various picture editors have appeared in recent years, Photoshop is still one of the most popular design tools in 2024. It all started when Adobe released the first version of Photoshop on February 19, 1990.
Photoshop now officially supports M1 Mac
How did Adobe Photoshop change the way you edit photos 34 years ago?
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Before Photoshop there was Display
Let’s go back to 1987, when Thomas Knoll, a doctoral student, began writing code for Display, an application that could convert monochrome images to grayscale on his Macintosh Plus system. His brother John Knoll, who worked at visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, saw the invention’s potential. John encouraged Thomas to expand the application’s capabilities by turning Display into an all-in-one image editing tool.
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Within a year, the brothers launched version 0.63 “Bond”, the first prototype of Photoshop. In the same year, Thomas contacted Barneyscan, a company that mainly produces desktop scanners. In 1988, there was little interest in the scanner market because users could do almost nothing with the scanned images, so Barneyscan needed an innovation to attract users to its 24-bit scanner.
Image source: Adobe Systems Incorporated (via Macintosh Repository)
The Knoll brothers’ Photoshop application is the company’s golden goose. Even in its early stages, users could not only resize, sharpen, and convert images, but also modify the color of digital images. At the time, only industrial-strength tools allowed modification of scanned images, and they could cost up to $1 million. By comparison, Photoshop, paired with a Barneyscan scanner, allowed users to edit and scan images for as little as $15,000. .
Barneyscan starts selling rebranded version of Photoshop
Due to Barneyscan’s high interest in acquiring Photoshop, Thomas Knoll proposed selling the rights to Photoshop for $300,000 and receiving 18% of the revenue generated from use of the image editor. Barneyscan countered this with a short-term partnership proposal that would provide a $250 tax on every sale of their Photoshop bundle of scanners. Once the deal was accepted by the Knoll brothers, the company began shipping their scanners as Barneyscan XP, a modified version of Photoshop that ran only on proprietary hardware.
Image Source:First Vision
Meanwhile, John traveled to Silicon Valley to demonstrate the app to Apple and Adobe. Both companies were impressed with Photoshop, and Adobe obtained a license to sell the application in September 1988. On February 19, 1990, Adobe launched the first commercially available version of macOS (or Classic Mac OS as it is known today).
Photoshop proved to be a successful venture for Adobe
After its launch, Adobe’s version of Photoshop quickly gained widespread attention among users, and its popularity continued to soar over the next few years. In the early days, when just editing a single photo could easily cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars, what really solidified Photoshop’s position as the leader was the fact that it made it easier for the average user to retouch and modify images. With Adobe Photoshop, all you need is a Macintosh system and you can retouch as many images as you want for a one-time payment of $895.
Image Source:First Vision
Soon, Microsoft realized the potential of Photoshop. In 1993, the company ported Adobe Photoshop 2.5 to Windows, making this killer app available to more users. During this period, Adobe’s contract with the Knoll brothers stipulated that the company must pay royalties on every Photoshop sale. This led to Adobe eventually purchasing the rights to Photoshop from the Knoll brothers in 1995 for $34.5M.
Today, 34 years later
After acquiring Photoshop, Adobe began adding more features to the application. By the early 2000s, Photoshop became synonymous with image editing. Photoshop became so popular that many companies began to focus on developing plug-ins and add-ons for the application. In October 2003, Adobe launched the first commercial version of the application under the name Photoshop CS, with an overhauled UI. After spending a decade integrating new features into Photoshop, Adobe switched to a subscription model and began offering Photoshop and other products under Creative Cloud subscriptions. Adobe’s transition to a software-as-a-service model has sparked a backlash from the online community, although the company remains steadfast in its decision. By 2017, Adobe had removed Photoshop CS6 from its store, the last version of the app to support perpetual licensing.
Here we are, 34 years after the launch of this groundbreaking app. As AI takes the world by storm, Adobe, like most technology companies, has integrated generative AI into its suite of applications. Although Photoshop has changed radically since its early days, the fact that it still has a large number of users in this era is a testament to its success.
