Photoshop Origins
One of the most impressive things about Photoshop is the fact that one gifted family, consisting of an engineering prof, a PHD engineering student, and a talented special effects whiz working at Industrial Light and Magic came up with the core idea of Photoshop.
Thomas Knoll, the PHD student, is still heavily involved with Photoshop years later.
Glen Knoll was a college professor with two sons and two hobbies; computers and photography.
He had a darkroom in his basement, and an Apple II Plus that he was allowed to bring home from work.
Thomas Knoll adopted his father’s photography habit throughout high school, while his brother, John Knoll, purchased one of the first Macs available to the public.
Fast forward to 1987: Thomas Knoll was a PHD student studying Engineering at the University of Michigan. His brother was working at Industrial Light and Magic.
Thomas Knoll wrote a subroutine for a program to translate monochrome images on his monitor to grayscale.
The successful subroutine led Knoll to create more and very soon he had a number of processes for achieving photographic effects on digital images.
After his brother John saw what Thomas was doing, he recommended that Thomas turn what he was doing into a full-featured image editor.
The combination of Thomas’ programming abilities with John’s pragmatic design background led to a collaboration between the two brothers to develop more processes and improve on the initial application.
Even though the process led to interruption in Thomas’ thesis work, the brothers released “Image Pro” in 1988.
John suggested that they begin to sell Image Pro as an application.
Within six months, the brothers had a partnership with a company that manufactured scanners, Barneyscan.
They purchased 200 copies of the program to ship with their scanners.
They called on Supermac and Aldus, but were turned away at both, a move that Aldus would come to seriously regret.
Shortly after, the Knoll brothers struck gold when they won over Adobe management with their product, and formed a licensing partnership with Adobe that was to launch their software and Adobe into the stratosphere.
Happy Birthday Photoshop!