Adobe Photoshop turns 30: New features, history and evolution of photo editing software

Needless to say, all of us have turned to the Photoshop at some point in our lives to modify an image.

Photoshop turned 30 on Wednesday. Soon after being introduced on February 19, 1990, Adobe Photoshop became synonymous with photo editing.

It comes with a host of features and tools and to keep its users engaged, Photoshop has introduced four AI-powered features in both versions - desktop and on iPad.

Photoshop on desktop

Content-Aware Fill Workspace Improvements

One can now make multiple selections and apply multiple effects without leaving the workspace. Just use the new apply button to specify the needs before clicking Ok at the very end.

Lens Blur improvements

Adobe has improved the output quality of Lens Blur and put it on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). Thus the overall realism, including sharpness and has significantly improved.

Mac OS Dark UI support

Dark User Interface has been one of the more popular features of Catalina Mac OS. Photoshop now supports the new dark mode. System dialogues like File>Open and File>Save will also be dark if someone has dark UI enabled.

Performance improvements

There have been some performance improvements and thus panning and zooming has become smoother and more responsive.

Photoshop on iPad

Object Selection tool

The feature which was released in Photoshop on desktop at MAX 2019 three months back is now available on iPad as well. Both use Sensei AI and machine learning to automatically make selections and radically reduce the steps to results.

The Object Selection tool gives users more speed, and allows more control over the selection process.

Type settings

This feature brings many typographic controls of Photoshop desktop to the iPad. Makers have also added type layer, character and options properties.

History and evolution of Photoshop

Photoshop was created by brothers John Knoll and Thomas Knoll.

According to Creative Bloq, it was sometime around 1987 when Thomas purchased an Apple Mac Plus to get help with his thesis. He was saddened when he got to know that it could not display greyscale images on the monochrome monitor. He then started to write his own code to continue with his work.

John, who was on a holiday, was impressed seeing the progress by Thomas. They both then came together for a larger, more cohesive application, which they dubbed Display. Gradually, John started to delve more into Display and became all inquisitive for features such as gamma correction, loading and saving other file formats.

Thomas came up with an innovative method of selecting and affecting only a few parts of the image, as well as a set of image-processing routines, which would later become plug-ins, the report added.

A feature to adjust tones (levels) was also developed along with controls for balance, hue and saturation. Display became ImagePro in 1988 and the brothers started thinking of selling it as a commercial application.

After looking for competitors of ImagePro, Thomas found out it is way ahead of anything available that time in the market. On finding that the name ImagePro was already taken, they zeroed in on Photoshop.

John even travelled to Silicon Valley and demonstrated the program to engineers at Apple and Russell Brown, art director at Adobe. Adobe then decided to purchase the license to distribute Photoshop in September 1988.

Photoshop 1.0 was released on February 19, 1990, exclusively for Macintosh.

In 1993, Adobe chief architect Seetharaman Narayanan ported Photoshop to Microsoft Windows, making it reach a wider audience. Subsequent versions followed.