February 19, 1990: Adobe Systems ships the first commercial version of its soon-to-be-iconic Photoshop photo editing software. The launch of Photoshop, exclusive to the Macintosh, gives users powerful new tools for tweaking digital images.
Groundbreaking software debuts for Mac System 6.0.3. Priced at $895, Photoshop is quickly becoming the standard editing tool for graphics professionals. Whether they work for advertising agencies, news organizations—or, frankly, anywhere else—Photoshop users use the program’s digital darkroom tools to seamlessly manipulate images.
Photography will never be the same again.
Launching Photoshop: From ILM to Adobe
When Adobe Photoshop arrived, it was a specialized tool for graphics professionals, allowing users to erase blemishes, composite layers, and adjust tones in ways that were once the domain of darkrooms and skilled photo retouchers.
But the legacy of this Mac-only software isn’t just about creative liberation. It is also about the beginning of a profound change in our visual culture. Adobe’s powerful tool makes it easy for anyone to blur the line between real and altered images. And that legacy lives on today, from impossibly shiny product shots to generative deepfakes and other AI-generated images that flood our social feeds and challenge our trust in what we see.
Origin of Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop itself took a peculiar path to commercial dominance, developed by brothers Thomas and John Knoll.
Thomas Knoll started developing software as a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan in 1987, three years before Photoshop was launched. When he discovered that his Macintosh Plus computer would not display grayscale images correctly, he began coding a program to help him.
Thomas’ brother John headed the special effects department on George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic. Together, they developed Thomas’s idea into an image editing program they called Display. They later renamed it Image-Pro, then Photoshop. The Knolls completed the first alpha version, Photoshop 0.63, in October 1988. However, they never released this version to the public.
Adobe Systems purchased the program and then released it in February 1990 as Adobe Photoshop, a standalone software application. Once Photoshop hit the mass market, it changed image editing forever.
Running Photoshop on Mac changes the image editing game
Compared to today’s Photoshop, version 1.0 seems unsurprisingly quite primitive. Still, the launch of Photoshop represented a giant leap forward compared to other graphics applications available at the time. Version 1.0 boasted revolutionary tools like the Lasso and Magic Wand that made it easy to select and copy image elements.
Similar to today’s concerns about AI-generated deepfakes, Photoshop woke people up to how computers can be used to manipulate images. In 1990, the year Adobe released Photoshop 1.0, photography critic Fred Ritchin wrote:
“(As the public begins to perceive photography as unreliable, those who control its use should be clear about what they are doing with photography. They should address both the issue of computer manipulation of images and the more general tendency to use photos to illustrate preconceived notions and self-fulfilling prophecies.”
For fun, check this out InfoWorld article about the launch of Photoshop in the early 1990s. Compares Adobe’s software to another advanced graphics editor of the time, Letraset’s ColorStudio.
The piece does a good job of summarizing what Photoshop changed the game in its day. Although, as the author noted, it was “quite a large program… (occupying) about 2 megabytes”.
Adobe donated the source code for Adobe Photoshop 1.0 to the Computer History Museum in February 2013.
Photoshop sets a new standard
In the years following Photoshop’s launch, the software has become the standard application for anyone working with graphics. Today, more than two dozen versions later, Adobe sells Photoshop as subscription software and bundles it into its Creative Cloud suite. And the iPad version of Photoshop continues to add desktop-level features.
Other image editors—including Pixelmator Pro, which is part of Apple’s Creator Studio software package—have challenged Adobe’s pioneering software over the years. However, Photoshop remains the gold standard for many people. (For more information read on Cult of Mac’buying guide: Apple Creator Studio vs. Adobe Creative Cloud: Which creative suite should you choose?)
All that creative image manipulation started on this day in 1990 with the launch of Photoshop on the Mac.
Do you remember starting Photoshop? Have you used Photoshop 1.0 before? What are your memories of this game-changing software? Let us know in the comments below.
