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THE INVENTION OF PHOTOSHOP

Thomas Knoll

I’ve been a longtime amateur photographer. I did a lot of black-and-white photography as a teenager, doing all the developing, the processing. I spent a lot of time in the darkroom, trying to make prints and trying to solve the classic problem of getting the whites to be white without being blown out, and the blacks to be black without being blocked. And the problem is, when you’re doing a print in a darkroom, you really don’t have direct control over the whites or the blacks. What you have is control over the overall exposure of the midtones, which sort of drags the whites and the blacks up and down together, and you have control over the contrast, either through different grades of paper, developing time, or variable-contrast paper. But that’s basically spreading out the whites and the blacks away from the midtones. What you really want is to control the whites independently and the blacks independently. So I understood the struggle of trying to adjust an image.

And even back then, I thought, I’m sure if we could do this on a computer, it would be a lot easier, because you could control things independently. I actually had little tables and charts that I worked out for the darkroom, exposure and contrast, to try to unravel the two factors in order to adjust each parameter independently by adjusting simultaneously the contrast and exposure to only move the blacks and not move the whites. When I was working on Photoshop, one of the first things we tried to do was a basic tone control where you could adjust the whites and the blacks and the midtones. And I remembered my struggles in the darkroom. So I invented the levels dialogue, where you have one area where you can see where the data is in the image, and you have one slider that controls where the whites are, and one slider that controls where the blacks are. It was a very direct manipulation of the things I had struggled with in the darkroom.

Working on my Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, I was doing some research in computer vision, and the first step of many computer-vision algorithms was image processing. So I wrote a bunch of little tools that did basic image-processing steps. Simultaneously, my brother [John Knoll] was working at Industrial Light & Magic, and he decided the next big thing in special effects for movies was computer graphics. I suggested to him that he use some of these tools I developed. So I shipped off my tools to him, and he kept on requesting more and more tools. So I combined them into a single application, and after a couple months of this, he had the idea maybe we could sell this thing, and eventually found Adobe to publish it.

At that time, the ways of getting stuff into the computer and out of the computer were pretty primitive. So the only viable path for Version 1 users was very early scanning technology, either slide scanners or flatbed scanners. A 300 dpi flatbed scanner cost about $7,000 at the time of Photoshop 1.0. And then to get images out of the computer, the only real practical way was to do four-color separations. You could get four-color separations on film and then do a printing press run. So the initial commercial application of Photoshop was for the graphic artists doing stuff for production in magazines or newspapers.

There are many features in Version 1. It’s fun to look back on it and play with all the tools and see how, actually, quite complete it was. And it had all the basic darkroom facilities, including dodging and burning. We had a dodge-and-burn control in Photoshop 1. It had quite sophisticated masking controls, which you could do in a darkroom in an analog way. I never did that personally, creating unsharp masks or such. But a lot of the digital techniques emulated some sort of very advanced darkroom use.

But Photoshop also contained things that were completely different than what you could do in any darkroom. For example, you have a hue saturation control that can spin the hue wheel completely around 180 degrees, which I don’t really know how to do in a darkroom without inverting the tones at the same time. So you can do some very digital-only things in Photoshop 1.0, but lots and lots of the basic darkroom adjustments were already available in Version 1. There are a lot of versions over the history of Photoshop. The seminal version is Version 3, in my mind. We did Version 2, and then Version 2.5 added Windows support, so that was the big feature there. But Version 3 added layer support. So it introduced the model that we still use today for compositing and doing nondestructive adjustments, where you can create a layered document and then move the layers around, and it saves all that information. So Version 3 is my favorite version of Photoshop, because it added that hugely important feature.

The idea of layers actually came from the movie industry, not photography. It was from animation. Because that’s how animators have been working for a very long time. They would paint individual characters on pieces of acetate, and then they would have a background piece of acetate; and they could place the characters on the acetate, and they could like, draw on new pieces of acetate where the character moves slightly, but they could put it on the same background. So they had this stack of clear material with paint on it, which is the exact analogy of layers, because you can add anything on any layer, and part of the layer can be opaque or transparent. So that’s the model we based layers on.

And everything in Photoshop, somebody had done something similar sometime in the past. So often it was on a very expensive system, or it was done analog. All we did was do a digital version of it. But it seemed very incremental to us at the time. But people coming into it, seeing it for the first time, it seemed magical to them.

Photoshop was in a very good position for a lot of technology advances, and we were in the right place at the—before the right time, even. There were several big waves of technology that moved Photoshop into new application areas. The first big wave was the World Wide Web. People suddenly needed to produce lots of photographs and reproduce them at small size for display in web browsers. Then the real breakthrough technology for fine art photographers was the inkjet printer. Because suddenly now you could print a high-quality photograph one off, not do separations and do a whole press run of thousands of photographs, but you could suddenly print out single photographs. So photographers could do a high-quality scan on their slide scanner, and then do a print of that photograph. It opened up a whole new work flow for the professional photographer. Then things totally exploded when the digital cameras became practical—and Photoshop predates all three of those things.

There are a couple of times when I realize the impact that Photoshop has had. When you walk into a bookstore, one of these big chain bookstores, nowadays, and you see the Photoshop section of the books, and there’s often three or four shelves of books of people trying to teach people how to use Photoshop. And that’s mind-boggling to consider that I started that program that everybody’s struggling to learn, and it’s so popular that every bookstore in the country basically has a little section on this particular product. And the other time that reminds me is when I’m watching a random movie or TV show, and they use the word Photoshop, usually as a verb. Creating my own word in the English language is kind of cool.

The original reason we did Photoshop was because it was really fun to manipulate images on a computer. We weren’t really thinking of any practical uses of it at all, but as soon as people saw that they could manipulate images very easily on a computer, they developed uses. And every time I watch really good users using Photoshop, I’m amazed by the variety of things they can do with it, that I would never have thought of when I was writing the program.

I’m still the first name on the Photoshop splash screen. Fortunately it’s just a name and it’s not a face, and I can live a fairly anonymous life most of the time.