Unknown history until the appearance of Photoshop
by
Adobe Photoshop is an indispensable tool for anyone who edits photos and processes images. However, there are many people who do not know their origin unexpectedly. The first Photoshop was released in February 1990, but the trigger was surprising.
Story Photograpy: History of Photoshop --History_of_Photoshop_Feb_2000.pdf
https://thedigitalstory.com/notes/History_of_Photoshop_Feb_2000.pdf
Professor Glenn Knoll, a university professor living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, enjoys photography and creates a darkroom in his house. His son Thomas Knoll was also influenced by his interest in photography, and in high school he belonged to the photography club and learned about black-and-white printing and color printing techniques, as well as color balance and contrast.
Another son, John Knoll, was interested in the computer his father brought home. It seems that the first time I touched the computer was the Apple II Plus, which was released in 1978 and expanded the memory to 64K. In 1984, when he learned of the appearance of the Macintosh, he called out to his father and Professor Knoll decided to buy a Mac.
Eventually Thomas became interested in programming as well. In 1987, Thomas purchased the Macintosh Plus for his PhD research on digital image processing. However, I couldn't display the grayscale level in the image on the Mac, so I wrote a subroutine to simulate the processing result.
Macintosh Plus purchased by Thomas
John, who was working at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) at the time, noticed this routine. The work that Thomas was doing was related to how to make the computer recognize the objects in the digitized image, so he asked Thomas to create some image processing tools. This was similar to Pixar's image processing tools, so Thomas put together the code and created a small app called 'Display.'
In 1988, 'Image Pro' was completed by adding a function to save images in different formats to this 'Display' and adding a gamma correction tool. Around this time, software improvements were out of the main purpose of Thomas' research, but Thomas began to be interested in the possibility of editing images on a personal computer.
Here, John proposes to make ImagePro a commercial app. Just as Thomas' research grants had run out and his wife wanted a child, he had to find a job. Therefore, Thomas decided to finish the beta version of ImagePro in 6 months and complete it as 'Photoshop'. John started marketing Photoshop in Silicon Valley, but SuperMac, which had released image editing software PixelPaint, refused the offer because he couldn't understand how Photoshop could complement PixelPaint. However, BarneyScan became interested and decided to bundle Photoshop with his scanner.
Photoshop icon created by Thomas Knoll. The application icon was really a Photoshop icon.
In September 1988, John demonstrated Photoshop to Adobe's internal creative team. The Adobe team loved Photoshop so much that it was soon licensed and released in February 1990 after a 10-month development period. After this, Thomas continued to be involved in the Photoshop project until CS4, and could not finish the essential research.
John, on the other hand, is a supervisor of special visual effects in 'Mission: Impossible' and 'Star Trek', and is involved in 'Star Wars: Phantom Menace' at ILM.
Thomas Knoll on the left and John Knoll on the right.
by Terry White
By the way, Professor Glenn Knoll is still a professor at the University of Michigan's Faculty of Engineering, and he uses the Powerbook G3 at home. However, the darkroom in my house is gone. It's because Photoshop has replaced it. You probably didn't think that your hobby would be one of the triggers for creating Photoshop.
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