TITLE: Reminiscing on the Effects of Photoshop AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: March 30, 2015 3:33 PM DESC: ----- BODY: Thomas Knoll, one of the creators of Adobe Photoshop, reminisces on the insight that gave rise to the program. His brother, John, worked on analog image composition at Industrial Light and Magic, where they had just begun to experiment with digital processing.
[ILM] had a scanner that could scan in frames from a movie, digitally process them, and then write the images out to film again. My brother saw that and had a revelation. He said, "If we convert the movie footage into numbers, and we can convert the numbers back into movie footage, then once it's in the numerical form we could do anything to it. We'd have complete power."
I bought my first copy of Photoshop in the summer of 1992, as part of my start-up package for new faculty. In addition to the hardware and software I needed to do my knowledge-based systems research, we also outfitted the lab with a number of other tools, including Aldus Persuasion, a LaCie digital scanner, OmniPage Pro software for OCR, Adobe Premiere, and Adobe Photoshop. I felt like I could do anything I wanted with text, images, and video. It was a great power. In truth, I barely scratched the surface of what was possible. Others took Photoshop and went places that even Adobe didn't expect them to go. The Knoll brothers sensed what was possible, but it must have been quite something to watch professionals and amateurs alike use the program to reinvent our relationship with images. Here is Thomas Knoll again:
Photoshop has so many features that make it extremely versatile, and there are artists in the world who do things with it that are incredible. I suppose that's the nature of writing a versatile tool with some low-level features that you can combine with anything and everything else.
Digital representation opens new doors for manipulation. When you give users control at both the highest levels and the lowest, who knows what they will do. Stand back and wait. -----