
20 Years of Adobe Photoshop - jasim
https://www.thoughtco.com/adobe-photoshop-history-4122594
======
BuildTheRobots
Any history of photoshop is incomplete without this programmers hilarious and
insightful comments/breakdown as he attempts to parse it [1]

[1]
[https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/master/XeePhotoshopLoader.m#...](https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/master/XeePhotoshopLoader.m#L108)

~~~
Nition
Any chance it's that ridiculous on purpose, to make it hard to implement in
competing software?

~~~
0xcde4c3db
I think it's much more likely that it's an accumulation of "seemed like a good
idea at the time" hacks, perhaps combined with nobody actually being in charge
of the overall file format. On older computers, you could sometimes save
significant save/load time and/or memory overhead by just dumping the in-
memory structures/buffers to disk instead of having a nice serialization
format/layer. Imagine what a file format looks like if a developer does this
every time a new feature needs its own data in the file, for 20 years.

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CharlesW
Wow! I just checked out the copyrights[1] for Photoshop CC, and Photoshop
still uses a (a heavily-customized) MacApp![2][3]

[1] [https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/photoshop-copyright-
tradem...](https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/photoshop-copyright-trademarks-
third-party-notices.html)

[2] [https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/13/3959868/photoshop-is-a-
ci...](https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/13/3959868/photoshop-is-a-city-for-
everyone-how-adobe-endlessly-rebuilds-its)

[3]
[http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...](http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2013/3/30_Building_Photoshop.html)

~~~
doomlaser
I just learned the other day that QuickDraw still ships in High Sierra. They
just don't ship the headers in the SDK. There must be bits of Carbon/QuickDraw
functionality still shipping in corners of important apps.

Pretty impressive for a graphics API that began in 1979 in Pascal and 68k
assembly.

------
Theodores
I liked the proliferation of other tools that existed back in the day, things
like the Kai's Power Tools plugin for Photoshop. Some products such as Paint
Shop Pro had the edge on Photoshop with features such as being able to read
more images and have a finer control of what gets saved.

In some industries Photoshop was seen as just a toy. If you had an SGI
workstation and you paid $40K a year to Avid to run Matador then you didn't
look on Photoshop as a serious thing (it was priced at 1% of the price of the
pro tools plus you needed a machine that only cost 10-20% of what your
workstation cost). Photoshop broke down this barrier to entry as did After
Effects.

There were good reasons to run the pirated version of Photoshop even if you
owned the paid for version. Before the cut down versions of Photoshop came
along you could buy a ridiculously cheap flatbed scanner that came with a
legitimate full version of Photoshop. Then you could upgrade that to the next
version that came along. That was how I ended up with a legitimate copy of
Photoshop for so many years. Then I discovered things like inline SVG graphics
and imageMagick. If you are working on the web then there are so much better
creative tools to be working with than the desktop publishing applications of
the 1990's.

~~~
exodust
I never heard of cheap scanners bundling full Photoshop. Surely you mean
Photoshop LE or Elements.

~~~
Theodores
You may be right, however, there certainly was an upgrade path from the
scanner edition. This may have been when '4' or '5' ('n') came along, if you
owned any version of n-1 then you got the £150 upgrade price rather than the
full £450 sticker price as it was back then.

So you could get a £100 scanner that was in itself 'reduced' from say £200,
with that you could get your nobbled version of Photoshop for free, plus some
SCSI card that was 'free'. Then paying a mere £150 to get full and improved
Photoshop was not a difficult purchase decision.

After getting lured in by the cheap scanner I was on-board, paying for all the
upgrades until I discovered that command line image processing was much more
fun.

At the time there were lots of these pricing anomalies, e.g. ways to get full
MS Office starting out with some student edition. I even managed to upgrade
Visio from a version provided free on a magazine, before Microsoft bought it.

Funny to think how 'clever' I thought I was back then getting 'bargain'
software. Odder still is that I now use Microsoft's VS Code with vim
keybindings running on Ubuntu totally for free.

------
jansho
I still miss the time when I didn’t have to subscribe to Adobe Creative
suite...

~~~
AmVess
I had to give up. I got tired of the CC app itself breaking and requiring
reinstall way too often. And this is on two different platforms! To uninstall,
I had to get an uninstaller for the uninstaller because it broke.

I got the trial for Affinity Photo and bought it after using it for a few days
on both Windows and Mac. It doesn't have the pure power of Photoshop, but it's
95% there for my amateur use. Only $50 and I put it on all my home computers
for that $50.

The sub for Photoshop is cheap, but all the anti-theft crap they have baked
into it makes it a royal PITA to use.

This is the first time since PS 5.0 that I haven't had PS installed on
anything at all.

~~~
jansho
/rant I do contract work and it’s ridiculous that some clients specifically
request for graphics to be done on Adobe. When there are a myriad of other
options now, like Affinity as you suggested, and Inkscape which I happen to
prefer over Illustrator. And sometimes ad-hoc methods like online gif
generators and filters are all you need for a simple job.

~~~
AmVess
I'd stick with PS if I were using it in a professional manner simly because it
is the standard.

Affinity Photo is perfect for me because it does 95% of what I want, and it
has really good .psd support so all those gigs of .psds that I have can still
be used. It is the first photo app that I'm happy with instead of using PS.

Sure, it has some warts here and there, and it's not as fast a PS...but Adobe
has quite a long lead on them. They've done an admirable job catching up as
much as they have, and they are constantly developing it, too.

It has a 10-day trial which is a healthy chunk of time to get used to it. I've
been using PS since version 5, and I felt comfortable with Affinity Photo
after a few hours. I'm not a professional, nor am I a hardcore PS user, but I
am very familiar with it. 0 regrets switching so far.

~~~
jjeaff
But what about that remaining 5%?

It reminds me of those that day that an iPad can do 99% of what you need to
do. So to me, that says I still need a laptop for that last 1%.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
True, iff you use that 1%. Most people _never_ need Photoshop per se.

------
wallflower
Every time I see Photoshop, I look for the launch/splash screen to see Thomas
Knoll's name at the very beginning of the long list of credited names.

Without the software craftsmanship and skill of the Knoll brothers, there
might not have been the dynasty of Photoshop.

[http://www.drdobbs.com/a-conversation-with-john-
knoll/184410...](http://www.drdobbs.com/a-conversation-with-john-
knoll/184410606)

------
tehabe
What is still weird to me is this: Photoshop can't be used on a case-sensitive
partition.

~~~
userbinator
What's weirder still, is that fixing such a bug is unlikely to be very
difficult --- I've had to port some Windows software to case-sensitive Linux,
encountered the same problem, and fixed it by essentially making sure all the
filenames it uses were consistent. No one seems to have had a go at doing this
on the Photoshop binaries, or if someone has, certainly hasn't published
anything about it.

------
aerovistae
This would have been so much more interesting if it had shown how the UI
evolved over the years instead of the box art.

------
doomlaser
It's amazing how much of Photoshop's basic architecture descended directly
from Bill Atkinson's 1984 MacPaint for the original Macintosh — from the
window layout, toolbar palette, to many of the basic tool functions, bitmap
zooming, even the icons.

MacPaint: [http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/01/MacPaint-...](http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/01/MacPaint-screenshot.gif)

PhotoShop:
[https://elektronikgrafik.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/photosh...](https://elektronikgrafik.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/photoshop1.png)

~~~
dr_zoidberg
Windows 3.1 paint had a very similar layout[0], probably "inspired" on
MacPaint.

[0] [http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/Windows-
Vis...](http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/Windows-Vista-Paint-
Adobe-Photoshop-CS3-Killer-3.png)

------
moondev
Seeing all those splash screens hits me with some nastalgia! First one I
remember was Photoshop 6.

~~~
kalleboo
I had a pirated version of Photoshop 4.0 off of Hotline (because every self-
respecting teen had to have Photoshop), but I never actually used it until I
purchased CS3 (in a boxed copy!) for work.

Before that I used a Mac shareware program called "Color IT!" that always
seemed far more intuitive to me.

------
jimmies
I am normally a FOSS guy, but I have to give credits to Photoshop. I dabbled
in retro hardware lately and I am using an iBook running on OS 9 with
Photoshop 5.0. It's unbelievably powerful and most everything you want a
competent image editor is there. I can still edit my modern pictures with what
is provided in the program and it's really quick too. Oh, and what's more...
You can run an even earlier of Photopshop, I think as high as 4.0 or something
on classic-classic Macs, which have freaking Motorola 68k processors. I think
the only feature I miss is editoable text layers. It's pretty darn amazing -
if you don't have one, try running the thing on the emulator - Basilisk II.

No wonder the original authors boasted it as "High Performance Mac software."
It's pretty freaking fantastic.

~~~
bluedino
It's funny to hear people these days ask if the 12" MacBook can handle
Photoshop or if the maxed out 15" MacBook Pro is needed.

We used Photoshop in the old days on 300MHz G3's with 64MB to do all the
production work we do now. Sure, image effects can be rendered in real-time
instead of waiting 20 seconds, everything is faster, it doesn't take five
minutes to load a hundred images...

The editable text layers in 5.0 was the feature that I missed most whenever I
had to go back to a machine with 4.0

------
BeetleB
Kind of sad that Photoshop introduced adjustment layers in 1996, and Gimp
still doesn't have it. It's really a major feature preventing people from
using Gimp.

~~~
kakarot
It really blows my mind that GIMP doesn't have these yet. I've been using GIMP
for almost 15 years and things like adjustment layers and better tablet
support are the only reasons I have to use Photoshop for any heavy or
experimental work.

I know with a project like GIMP your time is better spent making pull requests
than making complaints, but I don't have the time and knowledge myself to
contribute the features I feel are missing.

~~~
lkerrekfjk
AFAIK they are using C + Gobject which doesn't help finding new contributors.

------
21
> On February 19, 2010, Adobe Photoshop turned 20 years old.

Wouldn't that make it 27 years of PS? That's quite some rounding going on in
the title.

~~~
_frog
Judging by where the article ends, I’m assuming this was published originally
in early 2010

~~~
tehabe
It says "Updated March 03, 2017" But who knows what has been updated.

------
elorant
I avoid installing anything from Adobe like the plague. Their software is the
shittiest I've come across with awkward UI and a need to update every week or
so.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
Have you used Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom?

~~~
elorant
I've used both. Photoshop is stellar, but you need a very powerful rig.
Lightroom doesn't make any sense at all. It's like it ignores your file system
and tries to handle files its own way. Thank God I'm a programmer and I can
afford not using any of them.

------
roschdal
I much prefer to use GIMP! [https://www.gimp.org/](https://www.gimp.org/)

