Happy 20th Birthday, Adobe Photoshop

Exactly 20 years ago, Adobe Systems came out with Photoshop 1.0. It took them five days to fix the issues of version 1.0 and release 1.0.7. The rest is history. In order to celebrate the occasion, Adobe is organizing celebrations worldwide, with central place being the Photoshop 20th Anniversary event at the National Association of Photoshop Professionals. If you want to see the webcast, visit the official page of Photoshop's 20th Birthday Celebration.

There aren't exactly many words you can use for application that changed the world of photography for good. Photoshop enabled us all to take a regular photo and turn it into a professional-grade sellable product. A lot of industries today, especially fashion industry cannot imagine themselves without Photoshop, that crops the human body in ways unimaginable to mainstream audience, that really thinks models look like that.

Yet, when the product actually launched, the idea behind the project was completely different. 23 years ago, Thomas Knoll was studying at University of Michigan and in his free time, he developed a pixel imaging application called Display. The idea behind this program was just to show grayscale images on black-and-white CRT screens. His brother, John Knoll began adding features and soon enough, Display became ImagePro, an application able to process digital image files, adding simple operations on the images at hand. Less than a year later, Adobe offered licensing agreement and renamed the application as Photoshop.

Originally, Photoshop was Mac-only application but Adobe released Windows version in mid-1990s, and today Windows is the primary platform as far as development focus goes. Unfortunately, this anniversary won't be marked with the release of Photoshop CS5, which is scheduled to debut in April, available as standalone application or as a part of Creative Suite 5.