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Original: http://www.maclife.com/article/feature/photoshop_your_life

From its humble beginnings on a grad student's Mac Plus to its complete photo-editing domination, Photoshop has changed the world in 20 short years.



Photoshop is everywhere. And while fundamentally it is the standard professional-quality image editor, it's also a cultural touchstone with a reach that extends to advertising, fashion magazines, television, film, and the news. Lighter versions like Photoshop Elements, Photoshop.com, and even Photoshop Mobile on the iPhone have distilled its power for the masses, and sites like PhotoshopDisasters.blogspot.com chronicle painful misuses for everyone to point at and giggle about. "Photoshop" the verb was even added to Webster’s dictionary in 1992.

In such a Photoshop-saturated society, it's easy to forget that the software hasn't been around forever. Since February 2010 marks the 20th anniversary of Photoshop 1.0, now is the perfect time to revisit everything from Adobe's systematic dismantling of its competition to the way the software was used to make Katie Couric "lose weight."


Two Decades of Photoshop

We give you every single Photoshop release, plus the effects of Adobe's software on its competition and our culture.

1987



Release: Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, creates a program called Display for his Mac Plus. It can display 256-shade grayscale images on a 1-bit black-and-white screen with dithering.

1988



Release: Display is renamed Photoshop, and the Knoll brothers (Thomas and John, an effects expert at Industrial Light & Magic [ILM]) license the first version to Barneyscan, a slide-scanner manufacturer. Approximately 200 copies of version 0.87 ship bundled with the scanners.



Cultural: The first working version of Photoshop appears at Apple, and the era of Photoshop piracy begins as engineers pass it around amongst themselves and gape in awe.

1989

Release: John Knoll demos Photoshop for Adobe's primary art director Russell Brown and founder John Warnock. Adobe signs a distribution deal with the Knoll brothers.

1990



Release: Photoshop 1.0 ships. It requires an 8MHz processor and 2MB of RAM. The software fits on a single 3.5-inch floppy disk. Key features include color correction, image optimization for output, Curves, Levels, and the Clone tool.

Cultural: Photoshop is used extensively at ILM during postproduction work on The Abyss.

1991

Cultural: ILM continues to use Photoshop to create digital composite shots for movies like The Rocketeer, Hook, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.



Release: Photoshop 2.0 (code-named Fast Eddy) ships with CMYK support, Duotones, the Path tool, and rasterization of Illustrator files. But the HSB and HSL color modes in 1.0 are gone.



Cultural: John Knoll covertly releases a program to revert Adobe Photoshop's "eye" application icons back to the original "1HR Photo Shop" icon.

Release: Adobe releases an SDK for third-party plug-in development. Later in the year, Aldus (developer of PageMaker) releases the Gallery Effects plug-in package.

1992

Release: Kai Krause releases Kai's Power Tools, a popular plug-in set for Photoshop featuring graphically rich (and often bewildering) visual interfaces.

1993

Release: Photoshop 2.5 (code-named Merlin) ships with 16-bit image support, palettes, Quick Mask, Dodge and Burn tools, and the Variations visual color-correction tool. This is the first Photoshop version available on Windows as well as Mac.

1994

Cultural: Time magazine runs a cover photo of O.J. Simpson that was photoshopped with very dark color correction, creating controversy over how African Americans are portrayed by the media.



Release: Photoshop 3.0 (code-named Tiger Mountain) introduces image layers, often considered the most important feature ever added to the program.

Release: Alien Skin Software delivers the first drop-shadow effect plugin for Photoshop.

Competition: Adobe acquires Aldus, keeping PageMaker on life support by burying Windows-only image editor PhotoStyler.

Competition: HSC Software introduces Live Picture, billed as a next-generation nondestructive image editor, for a whopping introductory price of $3,995.

1995

Competition: HSC Software lowers Live Picture price to $995 in one fell swoop, angering early adopters who paid full price.

Competition: Quark introduces XPosure image-editing software at the Seybold Seminars in Boston. Developed in conjunction with Japanese electronics giant JVC, the product boasts a nondestructive filter featuring "lenses"... but it never ships.

1996



Release: Photoshop 4.0 (code-named Big Electric cat) ships with nondestructive adjustment layers, Actions, macros, grids, guides, the Free Transform tool, and a radically redesigned user interface. Photoshop 4.0 LE (Limited Edition) is bundled with a wide range of image scanners.

Competition: Macromedia ships its xRes image editor, which also features nondestructive image editing. Although it soon became another footnote in image editing hisotry, you can still see a bit of its DNA in Adobe Fireworks.

1997

Competition: Former Apple CEO John Sculley becomes chairman of Live Picture and tries to salvage Live Picture technology for web applications.

1998



Release: Photoshop 5.0 (code-named Strange Cargo) ships. New features include the History palette and its multiple undos, editable type, layer effects (now called Styles), spot colors, ICC color management, and the Magnetic Lasso tool. CMYK files go to 64-bit (16 bits/channel). The new 3D Transform plug-in is the forerunner to the 3D menu in the current Extended version, and this is also the first Photoshop that supported integrated online updating.

Competition: Live Picture is spotted selling in mail-order catalogs for under $100.

1999



Release: Adobe ImageReady 2 becomes part of Photoshop 5.5, allowing animated GIFs and sliced JPEG images. This release also adds the Extract command (for isolating images from their backgrounds), the Art History Brush, and Save For Web.

2000



Release: Photoshop 6.0 (code-named Venus in Furs) includes vector-based shapes, content layers (solid, gradient, and texture fills), Layer Styles, the Liquefy filter, a tool options bar, layer-based slicing for HTML work, and an extensive interface overhaul.

2001

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2002



Release: Photoshop 7.0 (code-named Liquid Sky) ships with the Healing Brush tool, a revamped brush engine, integrated image browser, custom workspaces, and even a spell checker. It's the last version that runs under Mac OS 9.

Release: Adobe releases the consumer-oriented Photoshop Elements package, which replaces the earlier LE versions of Photoshop that were bundled with many third-party scanners and digitizers.

2003

Release: Photoshop 7.0.1 update includes support for RAW image formats via the Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in.



Release: Photoshop CS (code-named Dark Matter), included in all Adobe Creative Suite editions, has layer groups, the Shadow/Highlight and Match Color tools, text on a path, the Lens Blur filter, custom keyboard shortcuts, and JavaScript support. CS is the first version to require activation, have Standard and Extended versions, and a PDF manual.

Cultural: Photoshop CS also includes code to automatically detect attempts to scan currency banknotes, fueling many conspiracy theories.

2004

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2005



Release: Photoshop CS2 (code-named Space Monkey) ships with Bridge (which replaces integrated Browser), Smart Objects, Spot Healing tool, Vanishing Point and Red retouching tools, HDR (high dynamic range; 32 bits per channel) merging abilities, and the Lens Correction filter. A rather significant but subtle addition to CS2 is the ability to select more than one layer at a time.

2006

Release: Adobe releases a public beta of Photoshop Lightroom, an image-management database aimed at professional photographers.

2007



Cultural: Newswire service Reuters is caught in a scandal when it's busted using Photoshop to enhance smoke plumes in an image of Beirut.



Cultural: CBS's official photo of news anchor Katie Couric is photoshopped to shave a few too many pounds off her frame.

2008

Release: Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 ships.



Release: Photoshop CS3 (code-named Red Pill) ships with native Intel processor support, Smart Filters, the ability to import and process video, significant interface revisions, the Black and White conversion tool, far more support for editing images with more than 8 bits/channel, and a seriously improved Clone tool.



Cultural: Iran's state-run media agency releases a photo of a missile test, altered to add a fourth missile. (The third missile from the right is a clone of the second missile.)

Release: Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 is released, adding 64-bit operation, multiple-monitor support, localized image corrections, and enhanced editing abilities.



Release: Photoshop CS4 (code-named Stonehenge) ships with OpenGL acceleration, Content Aware Scaling, 64-bit support for Windows Vista (but not Mac!), improved RAW image processing, and auto layer-alignment tools.

2009



Release: Adobe makes Photoshop.com available for the iPhone as a free mobile edition, delivering limited image editing on the run.

Release: Adobe launches a public beta of Lightroom 3.0, featuring better grain- and noise-management tools.

2010

Cultural: Photoshop turns 20! China is the traditional gift, but we'd prefer CS5.

I started on 7 surprised