The History of Photoshop

Gammu writes "For the past fifteen plus years, Photoshop has turned into the killer app for graphics designers on the Mac. It was originally written as a support app for a grad student's thesis and struggled to find wide commercial release. Eventually, Adobe licensed the app and has sold millions of copies." Achewood's Chris Onstad also offers a different take of how it all went down.

Licensed?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I think it was less Adobe's licencing of the product than simply their tacit approval of its widespread warezing that lead to the rise of Photoshop. Despite it's obscene price, Adobe have never seemed interested in curbing the rampant pirating of this particular product.

The reason is obvious of course. Better for Johnny the budding graphics designer to get familiar with "'Shopping" than take the legal route and become familiar with the like of the Gimp, etc. Personally, I think Adobe themselves upload the lastest hacked copies of Photoshop to the usual places.

Eventually?

[ScentCone]

Eventually, Adobe licensed the app and has sold millions of copies.

*sigh*

It's not like Adobe didn't put a LITTLE bit of work into it over the years, you know? They didn't just license it, they've - for all practical purposes - completely rebuilt it over and over. If they hadn't, that which they licensed would have been totally eclipsed by products like Corel's PhotoPaint, etc. CS3 has about as much resemblance to the initial product as ... well, it doesn't have much. Bridge? ACR? All of the related products like Lightroom? The HISTORY of it is a little academic, at this point (both literally and figuratively).

Re:Lack of colour display

[imperious_rex]

the Mac wasn't colour for many years

Huh? The Mac came out in 1984 and the color Mac II came out in 1987. I'd hardly call 3 years "many" and yes, the competition (Amiga, Atari ST) had color from the start (1985) and until VGA appeared for PCs in 1987, the state of color PC graphics (CGA, EGA) was poor, to say the least.

Re:It is the 'killer app'

[larry bagina]

Historically, PhotoShop was a mac app. Dual monitor support, video editing, page layout, graphic design were all easier on a Macintosh than a windows box. Until Windows NT/2K, the OS wasn't stable enough -- at which point MacOS became second tier.

Re:A question for large print graphics designers..

[linuxrocks123]

I don't know about the truth of your other statements, but stop spreading the lie about lack of CMYK support:

http://www.blackfiveservices.co.uk/separate.shtml [blackfiveservices.co.uk]

Maybe there's something wrong with it; tell the developers if there is. But don't say it doesn't exist, because it does.

Thanks, now have a nice day.

Re:What did the Knolls Get?

[jackbird]

Tom Knoll works for Adobe and is still credited as a dev in the latest releases, and John Knoll is considered a giant in the VFX realm and still works at ILM (where he used Photoshop pre-1.0 to do matte paintings on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - I didn't RTFA, so I don't know if they mentioned that).

Re:A question for large print graphics designers..

[Catil]

I never tried it, but it seems like Gimp does run Photoshop plugins as well [gimp.org]

Re:A question for large print graphics designers..

[dr00g911]

Well, good CMYK support and reliable color workflow are two of the biggies for anyone who does graphic editing / design comping on a professional level.

It handles type (CS2 and later) better than any competitor.

It allows vector-based postscript overlays.

It allows nearly unlimited undos (history palette)

It allows (CS3 and later) non-destructive filters applied on a per-layer basis.

Channel operations and masking are vastly superior to any competitor.

It works great on 8, 16 and 32 bit images in RGB or CMYK plus any RAW format variant you can throw at it.

It's functionally identical with an identical interface on Mac, Windows and SGI (remember them?).

It has brilliantly designed backward compatibility fallbacks written into the PSD format as they've appended to it over the years.

It has really amazing gif, png and jpg optimization routines built-in via save for web.

It's snappy, responsive and very thoughtfully laid out.

It runs natively on the Mac (instead of via X11), which happens to be where the majority of pro artists spend their time.

Bottom line is, it feels extremely organic to professional artists, has the best featureset, is installed on every freelance station you'll ever sit at, and it works straight out of the box with great documentation. It's the standard.

I check out Gimp, PaintshopPro or whatever about once a year to see how the most recent versions compare. They. Just. Don't. Not for real work, unless your time isn't worth anything.

Re:But Does It Run On Linux?

[bishiraver]

This is very true. Gimp doesn't have certain features which make it somewhat useless for doing even web graphics: blending layers, etc.. I use it for basic photo work at home, but at work I have to use Photoshop. There's no program that comes close to it, except perhaps fireworks.

Re:Gimp!=pro application

[Anonymous Coward]

There is utterly no reason to bother with the GIMP if you have Photoshop. You could waste time learning two programs, or just use the one more powerful program that does everything you need.

The tools can be complimentary. All of the trolls that criticize GIMP for shortcomings and praise PhotoShop are confusing Adobe brand familiarity with quality. I can't imagine cooking and eating with one knife--different tasks have different tools.

16-bit support? Oh I have to use a different program? Nice. I do all my photo work as 16-bit.

Then why can't you use Cinepaint or one of the other 16-bit programs? Again: my point is that there are alternatives to the Adobe monoculture, not that GIMP is one-size-fits-all.

I'll also note that the Hollywood studios that use it for movies like Stuart Little don't have the cash for Photoshop. These aren't the "toy" applications that you're describing--they are used for serious work.

Plug-ins? Oh, SOME of them work? And gee maybe somebody will develop some because it is so easy? Yeah helpful... I use a number of plug-ins.

You can use a number of plugins for GIMP. You haven't named a single one, so I can't tell you if your workflow would work with another program. In my design work, I've made (proprietary) plugins. I personally wouldn't be able to do this in Photoshop as easily as in GIMP/Cinepaint. Maybe you're content with plugins that other people make. I'm not. Again: One tool does not fit everybody for everything.

Decent file browser? Um, an X11-based file browser that isn't OS X-native is useless and ugly.

It is functional and PhotoShop is not the only native OS X tool out there! If you spend more time in your file browser than working with your photos and design, you're a hack!

I didn't think there was much beyond Adobe and MS software that supported OpenType well. From everything I've heard, OpenType is a bitch for developers.

OpenType is everywhere. It is an ISO standard & has buy-in from not only MS and Adobe, but also Apple, Pango, and the Free Type project. The Mozilla products, Xorg, LaTeX, etc. can all use it.

Listen--I have no qualms with you using PhotoShop. I just think that it is silly to rant about gimp and the other alternative projects and pretend that there are professionals that use this stuff.

Re:Adobe's fancy buildings

[yppiz]

Not that it necessarily answers the question, but Knoll is not on the current list of major insider stockholders:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ir?s=ADBE [yahoo.com]

Re:A question for large print graphics designers..

[Doctor O]

You know, I'm the CTO of a pre-press shop with 30 employees, and we often deal with way larger amounts of money you talk about. At the moment I'm working on a web-to-print project for a major car manufacturer which will be used to have around 1600 dealerships customize, order and distribute brochures that will be distributed by TNT Germany-wide. We're talking about 35,000,000 copies here. That's business as usual for us, and we're a small shop. Forget those $57,500. The cost of a failure can easily propel into the millions. I'm sure the majority of players in the advertising chain deal with much larger numbers than those you quoted on a regular basis.

That said, you're *so* spot on. A wrong logo color or even the "haptic sensation" of the paper can drive clients *really* mad. So you just don't fiddle around with something like the GIMP, you just buy the CS Suite licenses you need and have them paid off the same month you purchased them. Because, you know, there's always someone like me between agency and the printer, and you can bet I make sure that I deliver the data with the correct colors (actually, it's even a profession of it's own here). Usually that means PDF X/3, too, so if the colors come out wrong, I can just pull out the PDF I sent and show that the logo color indeed is set to the correct Pantone 12345, and therefore demonstrate that it's clearly the printer who fucked it up. Things like that happen regularly, and decide whether you keep getting those projects in the future.

To sum it up for all those morons who think because the GIMP is good enough for them, it should be good enough for everyone:

You don't put people's jobs, and therefore the income of themselves and their *families*, at risk for those ridiculous few thousand bucks the CS suite costs (updates are quite cheap BTW). Period. This is the Real Business World(TM), and if there's a relatively cheap, proven toolset that does everything you need and much more, I'll use it. And that's what everyone does and why Adobe have sold so many copies.

And spare me the "But it's Free Software!" You go ahead and tell that to the people who lose their jobs. I'm sure their children will cheer in joy because at least, they support Free Software.

Excuse the rant but seriously, I'm getting tired with all those know-it-alls who don't know shit about actual professional work, or business decisions. I'm sick and tired of those perpetual, unchanged discussions everytime the topic Photoshop comes up. It remembers me why I don't read the dot much any more.