Photoshop turns 20 today. It’s hard to believe that this ubiquitous pixel editor has been with us for a whole human generation. The yearlong celebration begins tonight in San Francisco.
I have been using Photoshop since 1993 when Eddie Tapp was just exploring the possibilities of digital photography. I was fortunate that he was using my studio to do it. I was able to watch him at close to the very beginning of this sea change of photo making as it evolved from film grain to pixels. Periodically I’ll step back into the archives and share some of the first imagery we made. This one is the photographic illustration we created for a 1994 calendar or Scientific Atlanta. Even then the client was in a hurry. We made this in December of 1993. The file was over 500 megabytes. We had to borrow a $2000.00 1 gigabyte external hard drive to carry the image to the service bureau for output. Now of course we would send it over the Internet. (There was no Internet that powerful then. Sigh.)
You can read more about Photoshop’s history in today’s New York Times.
