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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.
...Oh :(
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
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.
Photoshop is put on a pedestal as being THE ONLY program you should use to edit images.
I was wondering why that is?
Is it because graphics designers who do large print are used to using Photoshop and do not see a point in switching to an unknown program?
Is it because there are no alternatives that have the features they need?
Are free programs such as the GIMP just not on par? I have used Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and GIMP but I don't really see why Photoshop is hallmarked as the best. That being said I am not a graphics expert so I was wondering if someone who is and used these programs for more then 5 minutes could give me a good answer.
For one thing Photoshop has a lot of commercial plugins available for it. Generally when professionals say they use Photoshop they mean they use Photoshop and a lot of plugins that just aren't available for other graphics programs like GIMP.
I guess the itty bitty little article on the history of Photoshop was all right, but the linked comic really stunk. Aside from lousy grammar and poor sentence flow, it just wasn't funny.
Your message is written with such a serious tone, and I'll bite.
Do a slashdot search for any of the following terms, and you'll quickly be drawn into threads about why :
* GIMP;
* CMYK;
* Plugin xXx will do what you're looking for;
* But it won't do it in 32-bit colour with customized colourmap support unless you compile it yourself and since I use gentoo I'm still waiting for KDE to finish compiling;
* Yur momma is teh BOM in bed;
* Hitler used Photoshop;
* Suck a cock and die.
I always read those threads, mainly because I am interested in German history and human psychology. I couldn't give a rat's ass about Photoshop or graphic design.
A considerable empire and fortune have been built around PhotoShop. Adobe had sold 3,000,000 coppies by year 2000. I presume they have sold about as much since. I wonder how the creators were rewarded and what they think of the monster. Here are some questions the article raises but does not answer:
I'm relatively sure they don't come around here and fanboy dis GIMP.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You know, it runs on Windows too.
FC Closer
I do graphic design for a living, and there are a number of areas where The GIMP is lacking - but the big issue is in color space allowances. No CMYK support means no worky in the print world (unless your press uses RGB). I have to be able to not only convert an image to CMYK, but also control the colors to an extreme - I've had to remove all the color plates from the shot, increase the black plate to compensate, and then paint in spot red (for our press, that is 100% magenta, 50-60% yellow) over certain parts. Plus, the integration into the other parts of my work (working in InDesign/Illustrator for ads) is purely delightful.
Plus, CS2's RAW image importing is.. well.. I love it. Can't even begin to describe how great it is to use it's interface to import raw photos.
I still use the GIMP regularly - for minor stuff - at home. I still prefer my copy of Photoshop 6, though, for anything with any involvement.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
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.
Questions like this are just begging to create an argument, but I'm going to give you my perspective. The primary advantage of using photoshop for me is familiarization. I'm not going to complicate things by explaining layering and color mode compatabilities, there are solutions to those. The key here is that I am lazy. I don't want to search for tools and addons and plugins that offer features that exists elsewhere in a standard installation.
My other reason for preferring photoshop is that if you use any of Adobe's other quality design programs, it is all familiar and often easily interchangeable. Illustrator, Premier, or even just making funny little animated pictures with ImageReady, I feel better using software that I recognize as part of a family. Its probably the same reason I prefer MS Office. See item #1 about being lazy.
It has been ten years already that Clayton Christensen's book "The Innovator's Dilemma" was published. In that book he compared the evolution of several businesses, such as computer disk drives, excavating machines, and department stores.
The conclusion is that there is no fixed point separating "professional" equipment from "entry-level". Systems that are designed for amateurs or small businesses will evolve and become adopted more and more widely by professionals, until the old "professional-level" manufacturers go out of business.
What do the Gimp, Linux, 3.5 inch hard disks, and backhoe excavators have in common? They were created for amateurs, but are now used by many businesses. Perhaps there are some huge databases where 3.5 inch disks won't do and there may exist some mines where cable-actuated mechanical excavators are still used, but they are becoming less and less common.
If I were a Photoshop designer I would at least make an effort to learn how to use the Gimp. At least that seems the prudent thing to do.
The warez scene made photoshop popular. Remember back in the land of dial up where you searched through dozens of websites to find a few that had working links to applications? Back then, there were dozens of warez webmasters competing for the coolest apps and Photoshop 4 was in vogue. This was significant because all those warez runners then used photoshop to make cool graphics for their sites. Other sites drooled and so photoshop spread. As the piracy grew so did the rep, as the rep grew so did the legitimate user base.
Not that adobe will admit rampant photoshop piracy has been the best thing that ever happened to them. The real reason they and other software leaders want to shut it down is that they don't any competitor taking that freeway to success. It is in the interest of market leaders to raise the bar to market entry as much as possible.
Just so y'all know, Photoshop Elements does about as much as most casual users of Photoshop need, and it's less than a Benjamin. /me is waiting for the next version of Elements which will be a Universal app based on CS3. Currently Photoshop Elements is at v.4 for Mac and v.5 for Windows. It currently has to run under Rosetta with MacIntel which makes Baby Jebus cry.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
When you are working on a $7,500 contract producing media that will cost the client over $50,000 to print you don't trust your color profiles to some unknown program.
I can tell you that companies get really, really angry when their logo color comes out wrong. Sometimes you can blame the printer, but more typically it's the designer.
Adobe products do have quirks and some features do have steep learning curves, but they all do color extremely well and are very consistent.
I like Gimp, but that plugin doesn't sound like it provides professional CMYK support. And it looks like the project is dead:
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
Obviously, you come from outside the pro graphics world--the GIMP lacks basic functionality (such as CMYK colorspace for one), and is simply not ready for prime-time in this arena. In other words, if Johnny takes the Gimp route, he's going to find himself dealing with a bunch of issues that may be fun for geeks to overcome, but in this case, would take him away from the real task of image editing, unencumbered by software limitations. Photoshop is expensive because it's the best of breed by a wide margin, and Adobe knows it.
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.
Thing is that I find funny, that its taken 8 versions to have a Draw Circle Tool in Photoshop...The Amiga Dpaint had that from Day one.
Totally different apps. Even the titles give this away: Photoshop DPaint. Photoshop didn't have a draw circle because it's not a drawing or painting application - you would use Freehand or Illustrator for that. Photoshop is for the manipulation of pre-prepared images, and it is unrivalled at this.
Of course, whether you actually need its power rather depends on your line of work. Personally, I don't. iPhoto and Graphic Converter are plenty for me, though I'm keeping my eye on Pixelmator as well. However, those tools are fine for the kind of minor photo retouching I do. To do the full Photoshop workflow I'm not kidding myself - Photoshop has no serious competitor in its field.
Cheers,
Ian
CMYK matters if anything you work with is ending up in print. On a press. Period. It also matters if files you receive for electronic images come to you in CMYK format. Like if you receive images that have been used in a professional capacity and need to adapt them for web use. Let's not even talk about hexa- or septachrome workflows.
It's not rubbish, it's how the industry works if you want enough control over your image to come out at a professional standard.
If you can't tell the difference, by all means, send RGB files and let the press operator use their best discretion in the conversion. I hold my work to a higher standard, and that's one thing that separates the pros from everyone else. We apply custom curves to give crushed, rich blacks (30%ish cyan mixed with 100% black or it will look weap and thin), we order matchprints, we look at our separations and we attend press checks.
Photoshop's default compression for gif, jpg and png all suck if you use Save As-> after manually indexing. Their save for web option, however, results in wonderful results if the image is suitable for the format you're trying to achieve.
Look, I've used the gimp a ton. I've used PS Pro a ton. For *basic* work, where color, workflow and clunkiness don't matter, they work as advertised. I'm not debating that. Lots of people can use either of those programs until the end of time because it fits their needs. I'm not debating that. But, what if I need to copy and paste? X11 to OS X? No go. Rough, rough, rough edges man. Basic functionality is missing without even breaching the high-end deficiencies.
If you work with RAW images, CMYK, are doing pro level retouching/compositing involving channel ops, detailed masking, fine selections, variable feathers on a selection, adding arbitrary spot color channels, working with HDRI... I could go on until the end of time, point being GIMP and PS Pro aren't even vaguely suitable for the task and Photoshop is an absolute joy to work with.
I guess the point I'm making is if you think GIMP does everything you want it to do, and you don't mind navigating the clunky interface, then great. You don't need Photoshop. It fits your needs.
It most certainly comes nowhere close to fitting mine. Let's agree to disagree on that point.