Photoshop turns 20

The celebrations continue as Adobe's overwhelmingly popular graphics-editing software recently marked its milestone 20th birthday on Friday, February 19th.

From humble beginnings in 1988 as a program bundled with Barneyscan slide scanners (with approximately 200 copies distributed in this fashion), Photoshop has gone on to become the undisputed market leader for image manipulation software with over 10 million users worldwide.

"Twenty years ago, Adobe predicted that it would sell 500 copies of Photoshop per month," said Thomas Knoll, co-creator of Photoshop at Adobe. "I guess you could say, we beat those projections! It's amazing to think that millions of people use this software today. 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. The ability to seamlessly place someone within an image was just the beginning of Photoshop's magic.

Originally a simple image display program, Photoshop has spearheaded many of the innovations that today's graphic designers take for granted, from the introduction of 'layers' in Photoshop 3.0, the Healing Brush in Photoshop 7.0 and even the most basic commands such as crop, erase and blur.

Photoshop's large user community has celebrated its 20th birthday around the world. Adobe Germany hosted a 20-hour marathon with local Photoshop experts offering live tips, tricks and advice for novice and advanced users. Digital imaging contests have been held in both France and India to showcase the works of Photoshop users, and the original Photoshop team – John Knoll, Thomas Knoll, Russell Brown, and Steve Guttman – got together for the first time in 18 years to discuss the software they developed.