Happy birthday, Photoshop

It all started, as many institutions in our modern world did, with a bunch of Star Wars-loving geeks.

John Knoll, a supervisor at George Lucas' visual effects house, Industrial Light and Magic, was intrigued by an image-editing Mac app his academic brother Thomas was working on as a hobby, and started showing it around ILM. The computer graphics folks loved how it did most everything their high-end Pixar machines could do, but for a fraction of the price. It was used in the special effects for James Cameron's The Abyss.

The Knolls realized they had a hot piece of software on their hands, and set about developing it for release. John had originally called it "Display." The brothers eventually renamed it Photoshop.

An obscure Silicon Valley company called Adobe bought the software, and Photoshop 1.0 was released 25 years ago Thursday, on Feb. 19, 1990, for the Macintosh. It was immediately revolutionary: Digital photo retouching already existed, but it was an expensive business for high-end workstations, a process that cost clients upwards of $300 an hour. Photoshop 1.0 was priced at $1,000.

By the end of the decade, Adobe had sold more than 3 million copies. But more than that, they had created a powerful new verb — to photoshop — which entered the dictionary in 1992. Artist David Hockney was an early customer. Magazines realized they could use it to manipulate photos, and everything changed — not least when TIME photoshopped a cover photo of O.J. Simpson in 1994 to make him look darker.

We've been living in Photoshop's world ever since — a planet where retouching is the norm, where no image can be trusted. We've seen some breathtaking fantasies, and we've twisted body image expectations out of all proportion.

Photoshop has also found an unlikely ally in YouTube. Not only has the service long been filled with tutorials on how to use the ever-more complex software, but also tons of parodies and behind-the-scenes videos. It's a match made in visual heaven.

Posted by : Gizmeon