Adobe celebrates 25 Years of Photoshop

Photoshopping has become synonymous for image editing as has Googling for searching the web.

Adobe Photoshop turns 25 today. Photoshop has established itself as the standard application for image editing. The product even managed to become synonymous with image editing. Photoshop has been around before there was the web and Adobe was able to evolve Photoshop to grow with the web.

“For 25 years, Photoshop has inspired artists and designers to craft images of stunning beauty and reality-bending creativity,” said Shantanu Narayen, Adobe president and chief executive officer. “From desktop publishing, to fashion photography, movie production, website design, mobile app creation and now 3D Printing, Photoshop continues to redefine industries and creative possibilities. And today that Photoshop magic is available to millions of new users, thanks to Adobe Creative Cloud.”

Photoshop has tens of millions of users. It is used for digital image manipulation across all media: from print, to film, to the Web. Photoshop features. The Photoshop technology is also at the heart of Adobe Lightroom, essential software for both professional and amateur photographers. The new Photoshop and Lightroom mobile apps enable creatives to work on image files seamlessly across desktop computers, tablets and smartphones.

In 1987, Thomas Knoll developed a pixel-imaging program called Display. It was a simple program to showcase grayscale images on a black-and-white monitor. However, after collaborating with his brother, John Knoll, the two began adding features that made it possible to process digital image files. The program eventually caught the attention of industry influencers, and in 1989, Adobe made the decision to license the software, naming it Photoshop and shipping the first version in 1990.

“Adobe thought we’d sell about 500 copies of Photoshop a month,” said Thomas Knoll, Adobe Fellow and Photoshop co-creator. “Not in my wildest dreams did we think creatives would embrace the product in the numbers and ways they have. It’s inspiring to see the beautiful images our customers create, the careers Photoshop has launched and the new uses people all over the world find for Photoshop every day.”

Adobe sees the secret of Photoshop’s popularity in its constantly evolving capabilities and pipeline of deep image science. This pipeline of innovation is now getting to customers faster than ever before, with Photoshop and Lightroom desktop and mobile apps constantly updated, as part of Adobe Creative Cloud.

To celebrate this Photoshop milestone, Adobe is showcasing 25 of the most creative visual artists under 25 who use Photoshop. To be considered, artists upload their projects to Behance (link) and use the tag “Ps25Under25.”

In the coming months, those selected will take over the Photoshop Instagram handle (@Photoshop) for two weeks and present their work for the world to see. Fredy Santiago, a 24-year old Mexican-American artist and illustrator based in Ventura, California will be the first to display his incredible images, beginning today.

Adob is also launching an advertising campaign, “Dream On,” for The Academy Awards 2015. The commercial is a tribute to 25 years of art created in Photoshop. The TV commercial includes work from Photoshop artists and iconic images from major motion pictures that used Photoshop in the making, including Avatar, Gone Girl, How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Shrek. Watch the Adobe Photoshop ad below.