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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!
Please let's not have another pointless "Is the GIMP a Photoshop replacement?" debate. They're about as pointless as an ostensibly professional-level graphics editing program without proper CMYK support.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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