Happy 20th, Photoshop! It’s amazing to think that roughly 17 years have past, since I tried Photoshop for the first time (and later tore the shrink-wrap off my first copy (version 3, left). I was introduced to Photoshop while working at the University of Iowa’s Mac computing lab. Weeg, the source of all digital goodness in the known universe. Well, it was for me, anyway.
Seventeen years is a long time in software terms, but I can still remember the excitement of installing Photoshop on my “bad-ass” PowerPC Mac, clocking in at a massive 66MHz and sporting a whopping 16MB of RAM (I think). Any faster and I’m pretty sure that computer would’ve warped the space-time continuum, making time travel possible. Truthfully, tech specs weren’t the rage back then as they are today. All that mattered was I needed to ace my magazine and newspaper layout class, and Photoshop (along with the venerable Aldus Pagemaker) were going to help me do that. No more long trecks to the lab.
Apple Quicktake by H.G. Wells?
It was around that time Apple had also introduced the very first digital camera. It was about the size of a ham sandwich and looked a bit like one of the alien ships from the original War of the Worlds. I think it clocked in under 1 megapixel and many images turned out noisy and a little blurry from the tiny lens. But that didn’t matter either.
What mattered was the sense of possibility that it brought. To that point I hadn’t been formally introduced to the art of taking pictures, and it would be another five or six years before I decided to take that career path in earnest, but the idea… that we could snap pictures without film, bring those into our fancy Power PC computers right away, and work with them in Photoshop. That… that was just the BOMB. Think about the buzz surrounding the iPad today, and multiply the initial euphoria by five. Today we expect to be amazed and given perfectly functional products from day 1. Back then it was all new, all an experiment.
I remember one of the first images I created with my “digital arsenal”, Photoshop at the tip of the proverbial spear. It was a logo for a product concept that we had to invent, and then create some basic packaging and collateral for. Our journalism professor was nothing if not pragmatic. She knew that having the ability to design and layout commercial concepts, as well as double-trucks for a newspaper or magazine, would be important for her students. So I came up with a futuristic software company, and I used Photoshop to create a simple graphic. It was actually a pretty cool looking, orange and yellow spiral galaxy, on a black background (to blend in with the brochure background). Used up a lot of ink! So with just a little bit of color, texture and pattern applied to the canvas and this thing called the Twirl filter, my journey had begun.
Save Ferris (from Windows Paint)
Thereafter, many a flat-looking scan and layout were bettered by the inclusion of Photoshop in my workflow. Without so much as a darkroom and cheap enlarger, I quickly learned how to improve color and contrast, crop away distractions, apply subtle (and sometimes no-so-subtle) effects. Remember that back in the early 90s, this was pioneering stuff. Prior there had been Windows Paint, and that’s about it. Remember Ferris Bueller’s masterpiece?
Fast-forward more than 15 years and I’ve photographed places as far flung as the Napali Coast and the Welsh Highlands, taught photography classes, and authored several training videos, with more on the way. Photoshop is just as big a part of what I do as my camera and keyboard, and helps to make every good shot I create, and every tutorial, that much better or more interesting.
Thank you, Adobe, for 17 (really 20!) years of amazing software advances and creative possibilities!
