Photoshop

Overview

Photoshop is Adobe’s raster image-editing program, created by brothers Thomas Knoll and John Knoll from a 1987 display tool called Display, licensed by Adobe in 1988, and launched as Photoshop 1.0 in early 1990 (Computer History Museum). It became the industry standard for digital image editing by replacing specialised, expensive retouching equipment with software a photographer could run on a desktop computer (University of Michigan Engineering). Its real-world story is not a feature list: it is a licensing gamble that made a two-brother hobby project into a standard, and a 2013 business-model change that turned its own users against it (Computerworld).

From Display to an Adobe product

Thomas Knoll was a PhD student in computer vision at the University of Michigan when, in 1987, he “had written a program… to display and modify digital images” (Computer History Museum). His brother John, working at the movie visual-effects company Industrial Light & Magic, “found it useful for editing photos, but it wasn’t intended to be a product” (Computer History Museum). Thomas himself put it plainly: “We developed it originally for our own personal use… it was a lot a fun to do” (Computer History Museum).

Gradually the program, called Display, became more sophisticated, and “in the summer of 1988 they realized that it indeed could be a credible commercial product” (Computer History Museum). They renamed it Photoshop and began searching for a distributor; about 200 copies of version 0.87 were bundled by slide-scanner manufacturer Barneyscan as “Barneyscan XP” (Computer History Museum). The decisive step came when “Adobe, encouraged by its art director Russell Brown, decided to buy a license to distribute an enhanced version of Photoshop” (Computer History Museum). Knowledge at Wharton dates that licensing to 1988, calling Photoshop a program “licensed from brothers Thomas and John Knoll in 1988” (Knowledge at Wharton), while the Computer History Museum says the deal “was finalized in April 1989, and version 1.0 started shipping early in 1990” (Computer History Museum). Michigan Engineering describes a handshake agreement in late 1988, with Photoshop hitting store shelves in 1990 (University of Michigan Engineering).

The fit mattered. Desktop publishing was taking off with Adobe’s PostScript, PageMaker provided page layouts, and Illustrator made illustrations for those layouts — “but the market still hadn’t settled on a professional image manipulation program” (University of Michigan Engineering). Adobe believed Photoshop “could be a good fit with their existing PostScript and Illustrator businesses” (University of Michigan Engineering). The scale of the work was tiny: the first version was written primarily in Pascal for the Apple Macintosh, Thomas was its only engineer, and John wrote many of its plug-ins (Computer History Museum). “I wrote every line of Photoshop 1.0,” Thomas later told IEEE Spectrum, adding that the program is now “100 times the size of version one” (IEEE Spectrum). Over the next ten years, more than 3 million copies were sold (Computer History Museum).

Becoming the standard — and a verb

Photoshop’s impact, Michigan Engineering argues, was that “in the publishing industry, it changed photo retouching from a complex process that required specialized equipment to something that could be done in a few minutes,” and in film it “provided an inexpensive new way to produce special effects” (University of Michigan Engineering). Later innovations — “layers and digital masks have created a whole new visual vocabulary, turning digital photos into the raw materials for intricate, multilayered works” (University of Michigan Engineering). Layers themselves arrived with version 3 in 1994, according to the Computer History Museum’s account of the early screenshots (Computer History Museum).

Cultural absorption followed commercial success. Michigan Engineering notes that “Photoshop” made it into Merriam-Webster as a verb in 2006, with early product manager Steve Guttman suggesting verb use began around 1992, while Adobe “has been dead-set against the trend” (University of Michigan Engineering). Formal recognition came in 2019, when the Academy’s Scientific and Engineering Award went to Thomas Knoll and John Knoll for Photoshop’s “original architecture, design and development,” citing its “efficient, extensible architecture, innovative virtual-memory design and powerful layering system” and its adoption as the preferred artistic tool for digital painting and image manipulation in motion pictures (Animation Magazine).

The 2013 subscription backlash

Photoshop’s second real-world story began in May 2013, when Adobe announced it was “halting development on the Creative Suite (CS) applications sold as ‘perpetual’ licenses” and would only upgrade Photoshop, Illustrator and other creativity software via subscription, under the name Creative Cloud (Computerworld). CS6 would be maintained with bug fixes and continue to be sold, “but there will be no CS7 or feature additions to those versions” (Computerworld). A Change.org petition demanding Adobe back away from the subscription-only model “has collected over 4,400 signatures by late Thursday” of that week, with one commenter writing, “Paying Adobe rent for the rest of my life is absurd” (Computerworld).

Adobe did not back down. Its executives defended the shift to analysts on the grounds of recurring revenue — “the move to subscriptions just drives a bigger and bigger and bigger recurring revenue stream,” said CFO Mark Garrett — and reported 500,000 Creative Cloud subscribers, targeting 1.25 million by the end of 2013 and 4 million by 2015 (Computerworld). Thomas Knoll, for his part, told IEEE Spectrum that Photoshop’s engineers “were very much in favor of the transition,” because features now reached users immediately instead of having to demo well for a two-year upgrade cycle (IEEE Spectrum). The backlash thus captures Photoshop’s transformation in full: from a program its creators never intended to sell, to a product users felt they could no longer own.

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not resolve the 1988-versus-April-1989 licence dates; both are reported above. It does not assert a specific February 1990 ship date, a $895 launch price, or a 1995 rights purchase price, none of which was verified from a source read in full in this pass. It does not cover Photoshop’s later AI features or subscription pricing beyond the 2013 backlash, and it does not claim Photoshop was the first image editor ever made — only that it became the settled professional standard in the desktop-publishing market described by Michigan Engineering.