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20 Years of Photoshop
benwiggy writes "Photoshop turned 20 on 10th February 2010. Here's an excellent history, including how the Knoll family created one of the biggest apps of all time. The article also has screenshots of the workspace through the versions."
Thought not.
Apart from MS Office, it has to be the most pirated bit of software in the world.
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Not being a graphics designer, I never liked Photoshop which was too slow, bloated and complicated (and expensive) for my simple uses. In my Windows days, I first found Paint Shop Pro (of which I still have some prehistoric version somewhere), and finally ended up mostly using IrfanView and XnView, + occasionally PhotoFiltre.
While I'm sure Photoshop is a fantastic program for professionals, let's try a list of things normal users (like myself) mainly need in a graphics program:
- Rotate (losslessly for Jpeg)
- Resize
- Crop
- Print
- Convert to another format (Save as)
- Adjust brightness, contrast, white balance
Then maybe
- Edit metadata (Jpeg comments, Exif description, maybe IPTC tags)
- rarely convert a color scan to black and white.
- and maybe once or twice a year add something on a picture like text or a circle etc.
Obviously, Photoshop is really too much for this.
For Windows users, I know what to recommend (usually XnView; + PhotoFiltre if needed)
But I still don't know what to use on my Ubuntu desktop which has been my main machine for over 6 months. The Gimp feels just like Photoshop: too heavy and complicated (though the price is fine), and all the others I tried too limited (gThumb and the like). Is there a gem I missed somewhere?
While the sons may be known as the creators of photoshop their father is a giant in the field of nuclear engineering. His book "Raditation Detection and Measurement" is considered the bible on the topic for all nuclear engineers.
Out of curiosity, why would you use the scroll wheel to change a value? Most values like transparency or opacity can be quickly changed by hitting numbers on the keyboard. I'd much rather hit 5 to set the opacity of my brush to 50% rather than scroll half way through the spinner. To each their own but if you're using Photoshop all day, using a scroll wheel to change values seems terribly inefficient.
Anyway, it's nice of Adobe to keep improving Photoshop, but it's amazing how many millions of dollars have gone into this software, and it is still getting a bad rep for tons of crashes, expensive third-party plugins, weird bugs, etc.
It's also surprising how little the UI has changed over 20 years. If you look at the screenshots going all the way back, you don't see a whole lot of change. I guess you could argue either way: either the UI is stagnant, or it was so well designed in the first place that it didn't need to change.
As far as "tons of crashes", I'm not with you on that one. I haven't really upgraded to CS4 and I don't use any 3rd party plugins, but Photoshop is pretty solid to me. I don't see lots of weird bugs either. Expensive third-party plugins? I don't see how that's really Adobe's fault unless they're somehow setting the price through deals that I'm not aware of.
What I find a little more annoying is the feeling of being on the upgrade treadmill. Here's my petty little rant (don't read it if you don't want to read a petty little rant): I had a copy of CS2 for OSX, but felt a little railroaded into CS3 because I had to upgrade to get Intel support. Meh, that's understandable, but kind of annoying. Now Snow Leopard comes out, and they say they won't really support CS3 on Snow Leopard. Ok, that's annoying, but not a big deal-- CS3 still works. But I go to reinstall CS3 recently, and it's kind of annoying-- they dropped CS3 trialware completely off their website. You can upgrade directly from the trial to the full version using a credit card, I hadn't kept an electronic copy around. I finally get it installed, and Adobe's Updater won't work. The Updater needs to be updated first, and it won't work well enough to update itself. You can download the Updater from their website, but they try to push you to use the CS4 Updater. The CS4 Updater won't update CS3 software. So it basically takes me a day and a half of hunting around online before I find an update to the old CS3 Updater online. I install it, and it updates Adobe Acrobat from 8.1 and stops. I run the Updater again, and it upgrades to Acrobat 8.1.2 and stops. Run it again, 8.1.3. Then 8.1.4. It keeps going like this until I hit... I don't know... 8.2.1 or whatever the most recent version is. I'm sitting there thinking, "I paid something like $1,500 for this, and they can't make this all easier?" Then I realize, "No, they don't want to make it easier. They want me to get frustrated and just buy the upgrade to CS4."