Photoshop Extended for film and video market

Stephen Withers
Friday, 09 March 2007 04:16

Business IT - Technology

Photoshop was originally created by brothers Thomas and John Knoll - yes, John Knoll of Industrial Light and Magic, who was visual effects supervisor on Mission: Impossible, Star Trek Generations, Star Trek: First Contact, Stars Wars: The Phantom Menace, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones and other movies, including Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, for which he won an Oscar.

Back in 1987, Thomas Knoll had been working on image processing code for the Macintosh, and John spotted the similarities between what his brother had done and the Pixar system he had recently seen demonstrated at ILM.

The various tools were combined and extended, and eventually became Photoshop. After several knockbacks from various companies, the brothers made a deal with Adobe in 1989, and the program appeared as Adobe Photoshop 1.0 in February 1990.

For more details of the early history of Photoshop, see Derrick Story's article "From Darkroom to Desktop—How Photoshop Came to Light".

Adobe will formally introduce of Photoshop CS3 for Mac OS X and Windows XP and Vista on 27 March, but the ship date is still vague: (southern) "Autumn 2007" (northern Spring) is all the company's saying for now.