Adobe Photoshop celebrates 20th birthday

The venerable picture editing software Photoshop turns 20 this week, with celebrations re-uniting the team that designed it, as well as on – of course – Facebook and Twitter.

Photoshop has become the byword for picture editing, and is seemingly ubiquitous in the modern world.

The National Association of Photoshop Professionals in the US will be hosting an anniversary party in San Francisco, with plenty of guests.

Adobe, the company behind the software, will have a broadcast bringing together the team that created Photoshop to discuss and demonstrate their work.

Shantanu Narayen, President and Chief Executive Officer at Adobe, said: “For 20 years Photoshop has played many different roles – it has given creative people the power to deliver amazing images that impact every part of our visual culture and challenged the eye with its ability to transform photographs.

“It’s no exaggeration to say that, thanks to millions of creative customers, Photoshop has changed the way the world looks at itself.”

500 units a month

In 1987 Thomas Knoll developed a grayscale pixel imaging program that blossomed into a way to process digital image files. Called Photoshop, it was licensed by Adobe, with the first product hitting shelves in 1990. Knoll recalled that originally Adobe expected to sell 500 copies of Photoshop a month.

“We knew we had a groundbreaking technology on our hands, but we never anticipated how much it would impact the images we see all around us,” he said. “The ability to seamlessly place someone within an image was just the beginning of Photoshop’s magic.”