{"id":149813,"date":"2020-02-19T10:48:10","date_gmt":"2020-02-19T10:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sftarticles.wpenginepowered.com\/en\/?p=149813"},"modified":"2025-07-01T21:24:01","modified_gmt":"2025-07-02T04:24:01","slug":"happy-birthday-photoshop-the-story-of-the-worlds-most-famous-photo-editing-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/happy-birthday-photoshop-the-story-of-the-worlds-most-famous-photo-editing-software\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy birthday, Photoshop! The story of the world\u2019s most famous photo-editing software"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Disclosure:<\/strong> Our team is always looking for things we think our readers will value. We have received compensation for publishing this article.<\/p>\n

When we think about image retouching, one word inevitably comes to mind: Photoshop<\/strong>. There are many programs for editing image files, but Adobe\u2019s software<\/strong> has become on its own merits a benchmark for professionals and amateurs who want to improve their photos.<\/p>\n

2020 marks the 30th anniversary<\/strong> of the first version of Photoshop<\/strong>, a piece of software that came into our lives in February 1990 and hasn\u2019t left since. To celebrate this milestone, we\u2019ll revisit the history of Adobe\u2019s most famous program.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Happy Birthday Photoshop! Find out the best plan for you<\/p>\r\n Get it Now<\/a>\r\n <\/div>\r\n <\/div>\r\n <\/a>\r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/div>\n

Early days: revolutionary software for Mac OS<\/h2>\n

Although Photoshop<\/strong> was released on February 19, 1990<\/strong>, its history goes back a bit further: the predecessor of this software was Display<\/strong>, a program created in 1987 by Thomas Knoll, a student at the University of Michigan, to process monochromatic images on Macintosh.<\/p>\n

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The project caught the attention of his brother John, who at the time worked at Industrial Light & Magic<\/strong> (yes, the creators of the special effects in Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters). The two siblings worked side by side to turn Display into a program with many features that could be used on color monitors. And so Imagepro<\/strong> was born and later evolved into<\/strong> Photoshop<\/strong>, which was only available on computers with Mac OS.<\/p>\n

Want to see how the first Photoshop version in history worked? Check out this computer archeology video<\/strong>!<\/p>\n