Introduction
Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the market leader for commercial bitmap image manipulation. As with most of Adobe's other applications, Photoshop is available for Mac OS and Microsoft Windows; versions up to Photoshop 7 can also be used with operating systems such as Linux using software such as CrossOver Office.
How Photoshop came to Light
Thomas, one of the developers of Photoshop had keen interest in photography and in his dad's darkroom, he learned how to make black-and-white and color prints, how to balance color and contrast. While Thomas learned about image manipulation, John, his brother and co developer of Photoshop was attracted to the personal computer. Later, Thomas started working on Ph.D. work on the "processing of digital images." But the Macintosh couldn't display gray-scale levels in his images. To solve that problem, Thomas wrote a subroutine to simulate the gray-scale effect. Thomas's work led to more subroutines and chunks of image programming. These bits of computer magic caught John's attention and he realized that the work Thomas was doing had to do with how a computer could recognize a predefined object in a digitized picture and it struck to him how similar it was to the image processing tools on the Pixar. Both the brothers researched and found that there were a bunch of command line driven shell tools much like the Unix C shell command line interface of the Pixar and shortly there after, John and Thomas pulled these pieces of code together and Thomas built an amazing little application called "Display.” But John started asking for more such as Display saving images in other formats so that they could be printed in another program. This cycle of refinement continued over a period of months and led to an improved version of the application that became "ImagePro" in 1988. At this point John began suggesting to Thomas that they turn ImagePro into a commercial application. In early 1988, Thomas decided to give himself six more months to finish a beta version of ImagePro and let John shop it around Silicon Valley. Interestingly enough, many of the Silicon Valley companies that John approached were cool to the idea of their image manipulation program. SuperMac turned it down because they didn't understand how ImagePro could complement their already popular product, PixelPaint. But one company, BarneyScan, did show some interest. They offered to bundle (on a short term basis) what was now called "Photoshop" with their slide scanner. A total of about 200 copies of Photoshop were shipped with their scanners. In September 1988, the Knoll brothers' luck changed. John presented a demo to Adobe's internal creative team, and they loved the product. A license agreement was struck soon after, and Photoshop 1.0 was shipped in February 1990 after 10 months of development.
This was how the Photoshop took birth and it is developed so fast since its inception and now it is part of our daily routine.