The History of Photoshop 298
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.
Lack of colour display (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe we would all be using Macs if they at least had a 16 or 256 colour display a few years earlier.
A question for large print graphics designers... (Score:3, Interesting)
I was wondering why that is?
Is it because graphics designers who do large print are used to using Photoshop and do not see a point in switching to an unknown program?
Is it because there are no alternatives that have the features they need?
Are free programs such as the GIMP just not on par? I have used Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and GIMP but I don't really see why Photoshop is hallmarked as the best. That being said I am not a graphics expert so I was wondering if someone who is and used these programs for more then 5 minutes could give me a good answer.
What did the Knolls Get? (Score:5, Interesting)
A considerable empire and fortune have been built around PhotoShop. Adobe had sold 3,000,000 coppies by year 2000. I presume they have sold about as much since. I wonder how the creators were rewarded and what they think of the monster. Here are some questions the article raises but does not answer:
I'm relatively sure they don't come around here and fanboy dis GIMP.
Re:"professional-level", what do you mean? (Score:3, Interesting)
Most equipment starts out as expensive, professional-grade products which percolate down to amateur-grade products.
I don't know about "most", but there's a LOT of "ameteur" level equipment that "professionals" use as well. The microcomputer started out as a cheap calculator, and now it's replaced the mainframe. Linux started out as an experiment by a college kid, and now it's replaced big expensive Sun/HP/AIX boxes. The video toaster on the Amiga did a lot of eye-candy video stuff really cheaply that the then expensive-ass "professional" grade video editors couldn't.
Anyway, I think you're ignoring the larger picture brought up by the original poster. That the distinctions between "ameteur" and "professional" are really quite meaningless and artificial. I'd even argue it's really a lot of marketing whooey. Anyone smart will ignore all that nonsense and buy the tool that gets the job done.
To give an example, currently I'm looking into getting some speakers. If you measure performance by the only fair way, accurate sound reproduction, the cheap $100 sony bookshelf speakers outperform $1400 Infinity super-dupers. For floorstanding speakers the $280 Sony's are equally as good as "great name" $1400 Bose.
(BTW, he's talking about 3.5 inch hard drives, not floppy disks. Many years ago those big databases you speak of were run on big honkin expensive ass drives, not small, inexpensive, 3.5 inch hard drives.)
Re:"professional-level", what do you mean? (Score:3, Interesting)
They're all high-quality versions of previously existing products.
The first digital cameras were el-cheapo 35mm replacements. The first audio recording devices were essentially toys that just got better and better. And as for computers -- well, they're just an outgrowth of specialized adding machines.
Re:Eventually? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not only has the front-end been rewritten several times, they've released the framework that they use [adobe.com] as open source.
Why GIMP and $99 Pixelpusher don't cut it (Score:3, Interesting)
Graphic professionals usually quote the quality CMYK workflows as the reason why PS is better than the GIMP, but in reality the reason is quality alone.
The Adobe applications have, IMHO, amongst the highest quality of any apps I've ever seen out there. The apps consistenly produce the same quality results throughout the suite. The interfaces are very well thought out (the big changes in CS3 are the biggest in 7 years) and Adobe reserves a lot of time for quality control which ensures that when I use one of their apps in my job (I use almost all of them, PS, AI, ID, Acrobat), I can be fairly certain that they won't crash and that the results will be acceptable for print and the web. Added to that Adobe really pays a great amount of attention to detail, such as the quality of scaled images, which while many others support bicubic scaling these days, almost none do it with the same quality as PS does. And the list goes on.
There's nothing wrong with the GIMP and it is a bloody amazing tool all things considered. But someone would have to pay the GIMP contributors to spend more time taking care of details in the app to bring it up to PS' quality.
Re:"professional-level", what do you mean? (Score:3, Interesting)
"I know Photoshop, look at me, fuck your also-ran software."
Please.
I also don't buy the idea that someone can use Photoshop and not figure out how to do the same thing, in most cases, with GIMP. If you're really any good at your job, the tool doesn't matter as much as you make it out to.
Re:A question for large print graphics designers.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Photoshop does a few things very well - much better than its competitors, that is manipulating photos in a way a photographer understands. In other areas, it falls behind PhotoPaint for example.