Photoshop 1987
Photoshop, a software for processing digital images, emerged from the work of the Americans, Thomas and John Knoll who, from 1987, were perfecting a programme destined originally to images in various shades of grey on a monochrome screen. The scanner manufacturer, Barneyscan, agreed to distribute this very first version of the “ImagePro” called afterwards “Photoshop”, which means nothing other than “Photo Workshop”.
The Knoll brothers also met Apple and the artistic director of Adobe, Russel Brown, who appeared immediately very interested. Adobe bought the licence in 1988 and Photoshop 1.0 became operational on Macintosh in February 1992. Let us remember that at this moment digital photography was still in its infancy, and that this software was intended for processing scanned photographs.
The arrival of this new tool on the market caused quite a stir and specialists claimed it was a scandal in the face of photographic objectivity maltreated in this way…. They were simply forgetting how and how much retouching and photomontage were practised by photographers since the beginning of this medium! One only has to consider the tools used with Photoshop: pencils, paintbrushes, buffers and other gums and colour ranges, all direct references to the tool bag of the perfect retoucher.
