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"Luminous Art & Design :: Art & Artists"
Photoshop :: Biography and Books"
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Photoshop is the most popular image editor in the world. It is developed by the brothers John and Thomas Knoll and launched by Adobe Systems in 1990. Photoshop is widely used by graphic designers, web designers, and photographers.
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Photoshop is a popular image editor for the Macintosh and Windows, developed by the brothers John and Thomas Knoll and launched by Adobe Systems in 1990. It is the currently the market leader in software applications for pixel editing and processing digital images. It is widely used by graphic designers, web designers, and photographers.
The origins of Photoshop go back to 1987. Thomas Knoll, studying computer vision at the University of Michigan, wrote a code to display grayscale images on a black-and-white bitmap monitor. The program was called Display. His brother John Knoll was working at Industrial Light and Magic (the special effects division of Lucasfilm) and was experimenting with computers and needed a program to process digital images. Thus the two brothers began to work together on a larger application.
The new program could work in color and had features of selecting only parts of the image, adjust tones, and control balance, hue and saturation. By 1988, John thought they might have a chance of selling it as a commercial product. The name ‘Photoshop’ was given to the application and in September 1988 John presented a demo to Adobe. A partnership was established and Photoshop 1.0 was released in February 1990.
Photoshop was a hit. Desktop publishing was developing rapidly and Adobe positioned Photoshop as a mass-market, fairly simple tool for anybody with a Mac. Photoshop beat the competition with its well-written code and easy-to-use interface. By the time that Photoshop 2.0 was released in 1991, Adobe was becoming the industry standard. Photoshop 2.0 supported CMYK colors and opened up the market of the printing industry.
The third version of Photoshop (released in September 1994) brought the addition of layers, which has been the single most important aspect of Photoshop development. Nothing in later versions quite matched the layers feature for its impact. There was speculation that the Photoshop engineers had copied the layers feature from Live Picture, a competitor, when in truth, Thomas had worked on the concept long before already. The advantage of this feature is that objects are placed in separate layers and can be freely moved under and over each other. Layers can be added, removed or changed without affecting the others. The final result is the composite of all layers, which can be ‘flattened’ into one layer.
Many low-cost applications as Paint Shop Pro are competing with Photoshop by aiming at the amateur photo editor or home enthusiast. And there are unusually high figures of piracy of the original Adobe Photoshop products. As a solution, Adobe has launched Photoshop Elements, which is budget priced and many professional features are removed. Photoshop Elements aims at the general market and has already reached forth version.
Photoshop is now a big business with revenues of $1 billion per year. The term ‘photoshopping’ is a neologism, meaning ‘editing an image’ and is sometimes also used to refer to images that have been retouched or edited. On the internet are now also many ‘Photoshop contests’ and even games of ‘Photoshop Tennis’.
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