History

In 1987, Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display. This program, called Display, caught the attention of his brother John Knoll, an Industrial Light & Magic employee, who recommended Thomas turn it into a full-fledged image editing program. Thomas took a six month break from his studies in 1988 to collaborate with his brother on the program, which had been renamed ImagePro. Later that year, Thomas renamed his program Photoshop and worked out a short-term deal with scanner manufacturer Barneyscan to distribute copies of the program with a slide scanner; a "total of about 200 copies of Photoshop were shipped" this way.

During this time, John traveled to Silicon Valley and gave a demonstration of the program to engineers at Apple Computer Inc. and Russell Brown, art director at Adobe. Both showings were successful, and Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute in September 1988. While John worked on plug-ins in California, Thomas remained in Ann Arbor writing program code. Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990 for Macintosh exclusively.

Continual revisions were made to Photoshop, with new versions released in the following years. In November 1992, a Microsoft Windows port of version 2.0 was released, and a year later it was ported to the SGI IRIX and Sun Solaris platforms. In September 1994, version 3.0 was released, which introduced layers and tabbed palettes. In February 2003, Photoshop shipped with the Camera RAW 1.x plug-in, which allowed users to import RAW formats from different digital cameras directly into Photoshop.

In October 2004, Photoshop was released, entitled Adobe Photoshop CS—dropping the version number from the title. The name uses the abbreviation CS for products in Adobe Creative Suite. The logo focused around a feather rendered in shades of green in CS, and shades of blue in CS2. The 11th version, Photoshop CS4 was announced on September 23, 2008, retaining the same blue icon modeled after periodic table elements that was introduced with Photoshop CS3, this time featuring the Ps letters in a translucent black instead of white.

In January 2008, the Wine project announced official support for Photoshop CS2, allowing the Windows version of Photoshop CS2 to be used on Linux and other Unix platforms.