Happy Birthday, Adobe Photoshop
The BBC informs me that this year, we’re celebrating 20 years of Adobe Photoshop. It hasn’t been quite that long for me, but I cut my teeth on version 3, back in the mid-90s, and it’s now up to version 11 (a.k.a. CS4).
Strange to imagine a time before Photoshop. The technology of desktop image manipulation has become so ubiquitous. “Photoshop” became a verb quite early, long before anyone had heard of Google, let along spoke of “googling.” It’s particularly odd to think that Photoshop actually predated the spread of digital cameras by years. The first proto-Photoshop apparently shipped as bundled software with an early (no doubt slow and expensive) scanner.
Anyway, others have already made most of the observations about Photoshop that I could make (this story at Macworld seems to cover all the basics). So I’ll turn to pictures instead. Consider this worn image of downtown Sandusky, Ohio:
You can almost feel that yellowed, curling old paper
Now consider the fact that I faked it this morning, entirely on a whim; the unretouched image was actually taken in 2008.
...there never was any paper, curling or otherwise; this was a digital photo from the outset
Granted, this was hardly a thorough job of fakery. I almost left the modern cars in place, to be honest, but as I say: I did this on a whim in, what, half an hour? That’s power, for good or bad: when you not only have power, but it’s also so convenient you can all but take it for granted.
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