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Photoshop 20th Anniversary

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Photoshop totally changed my life.

I was a directionless Junior in College, doing the standard Business Admin bullshit. One day my roomate told me to come on down to the computer lab and check out this software. It was Photoshop 2.5.

I sat down and cloned a lemon that was used in the tutorials back in the day. The next week I was on the phone with my parents making the case to change my major to Mass Communication / Art Direction.

I don't know where I'd be today if I didn't clone that lemon.
 
Ha ha! I had kind of a similar experience, though not with Photoshop. I was in graduate school in the early seventies when they decided, inexplicably, to offer us a class in BASIC, using punched cards and teletype machines on a CDC 6000 at the UW (same computer Bill Gates used as a teenager.)! I discovered that the code was EXACTLY like a Symbolic Logic course I had taken several years previously to avoid math courses. I loved it and it became the focus of my life and career for the next thirty years.
 
If it wasn't for Photoshop and Quark, I'd have finished an electrical mechanic apprenticeship and wouldn't have wasted 15 years in media. Silver lining is I wouldn't be in the position I'm in today. So it's all good.

The advances throughout the years have been amazing. I can remember when they totally changed their Toolbar layout or shortcuts...I think V5 to V6 or V7...not sure...anyway, it had all the quickdraw artists scratching their heads and pushing artwork at the same speed as the noobs. CS4 is amazing and I'm sure CS5 will be another leap forward. I'm too old school to use filters or the fancy image editing tools.

The first thing I'd do after an upgrade is check out the easter egg splash page.
 
Good to hear from you David. Hope MacWorld was good for you.

Photoshop is a history making program. It's now a verb. Combined with a Wacom tablet it is an artist's dream tool especially when they added layers.

I wished I could have met John Knoll. I passed on a job at ILM to join his RoboMac team to join Dreamworks when it was just a startup. Oh, well. Worked out.

Schuyler said:
...I was in graduate school in the early seventies when they decided, inexplicably, to offer us a class in BASIC, using punched cards and teletype machines ...
Click to expand...

I may have been the last person on campus to work on punched cards. And it reminds me of one of my worst experiences in college. Had my final project, a checkers program written in Fortran, consisting of 1000 cards scrambled my an idiot janitor. Took me 3 days of no sleep to redo it and get it debugged. It was a lesson for me that made me realize I don't like programming. Only took it to learn about computer graphics.

I remember attending one of the very first Siggraph seminars. They showed a glass sphere flying over a simple grassy landscape. Took a Cray supercomuter two weeks to render that short animation. Now that can be done in real time on a desktop PC. Unbelievable how far we've come.
 
I still have my first version 0.85 beta on a floppy. I also have first versions of Quark, PageMaker, and several others. Time goes by so fast...
 
Photoshop is the lifeblood of my particular (admittedly small) profession, although Corel Painter could have owned that particular market if they hadnt been so arrogant/stubborn as to insist on doing everything "their" way.

I hate it when companies refuse to adopt perfectly acceptable defacto industry standards just to prove a point or to be "different" It's one thing if you introduce actual improvements, but more often than not its just one more thing to deal with when you are trying to be productive.

I remember when Photoshop and PixelPaint first came out as competitors for the Mac II. In fact I think PixelPaint was the first color painting app for the Mac, but now they are long since gone and Photoshop is king kong in that space.
 
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