Photography Research and Development of Photoshop.

Facts about the history and development of Photoshop



· The product of two brothers.

· Thomas and John Knoll.

· Their father was into photography.

· Their father has his own personal darkroom in the basement

· Their father also had an interest in early computers.

· Thomas experimented with photography.

· John meddled with his dad's Apple II computer.

· Their dad bought one of the first Macs on the market in 1984.

· The brothers were astonished by its capabilities but it was the inadequacies that lead to the idea to develop Photoshop.

· John Knoll worked at Industrial Light and Magic - Lucasfilm's nascent special effects division, founded for Star Wars.

· Thomas was studying for his Ph.D. on image processing at the University of Michigan

· Thomas just bought a brand-new Apple Mac Plus he was shocked to find it couldn't display greyscale images on the monochrome monitor.

· Thomas then decided to write a code that would do the job that he wanted.

· John was also working on image processing at ILM

· When the brothers met up over a holiday, they realised that their work was similar and both were impressed with each other’s findings.

· They began to collaborate on a larger application.

· John had bought a new colour Macintosh II and persuaded Thomas to rewrite Display to work in colour

· The more that john worked with his display the more features were needed such as gamma correction, loading and saving other file formats.

· Despite his brothers wishes distracting him from his own work, Thomas was more than happy to create these features.

· Thomas also developed a method of selecting and affecting a selected part of the image. he also image-processing routines and a feature for adjusting tones (levels)

· Controls for balance, hue and saturation were then developed.

· The above features later became the defining features of Photoshop.

· By1988 the display had become ImagePro and was adequately advanced. John thought they might have a chance at selling it as a commercial application.

· Thomas was still working on his Ph.D. when the brothers decided to take the newly developed prototype to the mass market, Thomas was reluctant at first, it wasn’t until john made it clear to him the extent of the gap within the market that Thomas agreed to the demanding work that was needed to produce a workable and profitable product.

· They decided to look for investors. This process wasn’t easy to begin with as with any other newly developed product. This process was made harder with the brothers in agreement on the programs name.

· Nobody is totally sure where the name Photoshop came from somebody sujested the name and it stuck.

· most software companies dismissed Photoshop as they were developing a similar product of their own.

· It was only adobe that showed immense interest in the program and was willing to take the program on. But this wasn’t as straight forward as it seems. Eventually a scanner manufacturer called Barneyscan decided to bundle it with its scanners.

· This wasn’t a long term deal so john soon returned to adobe to get the ball rolling into a more permanent deal.

· John met met Russell Brown who was the Art Director. Russell was highly impressed with the program and persuaded the Adobe to take it on.

· Photoshop was not sold wholesale but only licensed and distributed, with royalties still going to the Knolls.

· Thomas continued developing all the main application code.

· John contributed plug-ins separately.

· Photoshop launched in February 1990.

· When photoshop launched it cost less than $1000.

· The brothers started to work on version 2 shortly after the first version was launched.

· Adobe added more coding staff Mark Hamburg was employed to help with this.

· New features shish as Bézier paths, Pen tool, Duotones, import and rasterisation of Illustrator files, support for CMYK colour.

· These additions meant the program could be used for professional printers, insuring a stable share within this rather new market.

· The program's first Product Manager was Steven Guttman.

· Steven Guttman started giving code names to beta versions this idea continues to this day.

· 'Fast Eddy' - version 2 - was launched a year later.

· In 1993 adobe developed the program on the windows platform.

· Version 3 included 16-bit file support and most importantly the introduction of layers.

· Version 4 was similar to version 3 but only added adjustment layers and actions to the program.

· Version 5 added a colour management feature and the History palette feature which with its extra 'nonlinear history' behaviour created a wide range of possibilities for users. Also version 5 included Editable type and the Magnetic Lasso features.

· The following features have been added since then up until last year :



Version 5.5 :

· Bundled with ImageReady

· Save for Web

· Extract

Version 6:
Vector Shapes
Updated User Interface
"Liquify" filter
Layer styles/Blending Options dialog

Version 7
Made text fully vector
Healing Brush
New painting engine

Version CS (8

· Camera RAW 2.x

· Highly modified "Slice Tool"

· Shadow/Highlight command

· Match Color command

· Lens Blur filter

· Smart Guides

· Real-Time Histogram

· Detection and refusal to print scanned images of various banknotes[5]

· Macrovision copy protection based on Safecast DRM technology

· Scripting support for JavaScript and other languages

· Hierarchical layer groups

· 16 bit per channel layers, painting, and adjustments

· Support for files over 2 Gigabytes

· Documents up to 300,000 pixels in either dimension

· Type on a path

Version CS2

· Camera RAW 3.x

· Smart Objects

· Image Warp

· Spot healing brush

· Red-Eye tool

· Lens Correction filter

· Smart Sharpen

· Vanishing Point

· Better memory management on 64-bit PowerPC G5 Macintosh machines running Mac OS X 10.4

· High dynamic range imaging (HDRI) support (32 bit per channel floating point)

· More smudging options, such as "Scattering"

· Modified layer selection, such as ability to select more than one layer.

Version CS3

· Native support for the Intel-based Macintosh platform and improved support for Windows Vista

· Revised user interface

· Feature additions to Adobe Camera RAW

· Quick Select tool

· Alterations to Curves, Vanishing Point, Channel Mixer, Brightness and Contrast, and the Print dialog

· Black-and-white conversion adjustment

· Auto Align and Auto Blend

· Smart (non-destructive) Filters

· Mobile device graphic optimization

· Improvements to cloning and healing

· More complete 32 bit / HDR support (layers, painting, more filters and adjustments)

· Faster launching

· ImageReady removed

Version CS4

· Smoother panning and zooming and fluid canvas rotation

· OpenGL display acceleration in Photoshop

· Native support for 64-bit on Windows Vista x64

· Adjustments panel

· Masks panel

· Improved Adobe Photoshop Lightroom workflow

· Content-aware scaling

· Extended depth of field

· Auto-blending of images

· Auto-alignment of layers

· New file display options (tabbed document display and n-up views)

· New file management and workspaces with Adobe Bridge CS4

Version CS5 (the version i’m using currently)

· Content Aware Fill

· Puppet Warp Tool

· 64 bit for Mac OS X

· Bristle Tips

· Mixer Brush

· Automatic Lens Correction

· Easier HDR toning for beginners

· Improved selection and masking controls

· Camera RAW grain control

· New Blend modes: Subtract and Divide

· GPU HUD controls for brush resize, color picker, color sampling

· Improved Ray Tracing quality and speed (Extended)

· Repousse 3D extrusion tool (Extended)



· Image based lights (Extended)