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The History of Photoshop
Gammu writes "For the past fifteen plus years, Photoshop has turned into the killer app for graphics designers on the Mac. It was originally written as a support app for a grad student's thesis and struggled to find wide commercial release. Eventually, Adobe licensed the app and has sold millions of copies." Achewood's Chris Onstad also offers a different take of how it all went down.
I think it was less Adobe's licencing of the product than simply their tacit approval of its widespread warezing that lead to the rise of Photoshop. Despite it's obscene price, Adobe have never seemed interested in curbing the rampant pirating of this particular product.
The reason is obvious of course. Better for Johnny the budding graphics designer to get familiar with "'Shopping" than take the legal route and become familiar with the like of the Gimp, etc. Personally, I think Adobe themselves upload the lastest hacked copies of Photoshop to the usual places.
May the Maths Be with you!
Eventually, Adobe licensed the app and has sold millions of copies.
... well, it doesn't have much. Bridge? ACR? All of the related products like Lightroom? The HISTORY of it is a little academic, at this point (both literally and figuratively).
*sigh*
It's not like Adobe didn't put a LITTLE bit of work into it over the years, you know? They didn't just license it, they've - for all practical purposes - completely rebuilt it over and over. If they hadn't, that which they licensed would have been totally eclipsed by products like Corel's PhotoPaint, etc. CS3 has about as much resemblance to the initial product as
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
the Mac wasn't colour for many years
Huh? The Mac came out in 1984 and the color Mac II came out in 1987. I'd hardly call 3 years "many" and yes, the competition (Amiga, Atari ST) had color from the start (1985) and until VGA appeared for PCs in 1987, the state of color PC graphics (CGA, EGA) was poor, to say the least.
Tom Knoll works for Adobe and is still credited as a dev in the latest releases, and John Knoll is considered a giant in the VFX realm and still works at ILM (where he used Photoshop pre-1.0 to do matte paintings on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - I didn't RTFA, so I don't know if they mentioned that).
Well, good CMYK support and reliable color workflow are two of the biggies for anyone who does graphic editing / design comping on a professional level.
It handles type (CS2 and later) better than any competitor.
It allows vector-based postscript overlays.
It allows nearly unlimited undos (history palette)
It allows (CS3 and later) non-destructive filters applied on a per-layer basis.
Channel operations and masking are vastly superior to any competitor.
It works great on 8, 16 and 32 bit images in RGB or CMYK plus any RAW format variant you can throw at it.
It's functionally identical with an identical interface on Mac, Windows and SGI (remember them?).
It has brilliantly designed backward compatibility fallbacks written into the PSD format as they've appended to it over the years.
It has really amazing gif, png and jpg optimization routines built-in via save for web.
It's snappy, responsive and very thoughtfully laid out.
It runs natively on the Mac (instead of via X11), which happens to be where the majority of pro artists spend their time.
Bottom line is, it feels extremely organic to professional artists, has the best featureset, is installed on every freelance station you'll ever sit at, and it works straight out of the box with great documentation. It's the standard.
I check out Gimp, PaintshopPro or whatever about once a year to see how the most recent versions compare. They. Just. Don't. Not for real work, unless your time isn't worth anything.