Adobe Photoshop is now 25 years old

Adobe Photoshop ranks among the most widely used graphics applications in the world, and is an industry standard tool for graphic designers.

Officially rolled out as a commercial application for the Macintosh on February 19, 1990, Photoshop is now 25 years old.

I first saw version 2.5 at the DTP department of a computer magazine that I worked for, and was intrigued by the speed and range of features it provided.

In the mid 80’s I had used the OCP Art Studio on the Sinclair machines, which in retrospect, was a truly advanced piece of software running on merely 40 Kb of Z80 machine code.

Back to Photoshop; version 3.0 delivered the use of layers, changing the way we deal with graphic design forever.

To this day, layers allow for the easy composition of digital images from separate strata, allowing for changes to be reviewed and removed with little hassle. It was also the first version I used commercially, and every release since delivered several new tools, making Photoshop indispensable.

Today, Photoshop allows for the use and benefits of cloud based computing, and it’s subscription based. This approach has generated billions of dollars for Adobe, producers of an array of other applications for graphics, video, animation and web development.

Happy 25th birthday, Adobe Photoshop.