Today is the 20th birthday of Photoshop and Adobe is throwing a party. Tune in at 7:30 p.m. Pacific Time at this National Association of Photoshop Users web page. Of course the NAPP is very involved with Adobe in this party.



This is the splash screen from Photoshop version one. Only four names - the Knoll brothers, Steve Guttman and Preston Brown. A good short history is found at Photoshopnews.com. In addition to the above splash screen, the article has graphics of the original floppy disk and box Photoshop was shipped in.

I first played with Photoshop in early 1990 at a local Apple computer store, but it was not until the 1991 National Press Photographers Association Electronic Times Workshop that I really got into using photoshop. By 1991, Photoshop was swiftly taking the newspaper industry by storm - the key was the use of early $25,000 negative scanners. The scanners only took fifteen minutes to scan in a five meg file. Jpeg had also been introduced, allowing two - three images to be put on one singe floppy disk! Wow!

Turns out, at this NPPA Electronic Times Workshop we were using the beta version for Photoshop 2.0. This version added the Paths tool, which created the world of cut outs. It was version three, with layers, that allowed Photoshop to really take off.

Today Happy BD Photoshop. And the beat goes on - this fall look for version 12/CS5.

FYI, here is an 18 minute recent interview with John Knoll.

Here are a couple recent photos with some background notes.


For this photo from last Thursday I converted to grayscale in Lightroom and used the grayscale color sliders to add contrast. Then the pic was taken into photoshop and run through Topaz Detail.



Friday night I took another image of the Los Angeles City Hall reflected in the new LAPD Administration Building. This time city hall was half lit and half in the shade. After fixing color and contrast in Lightroom, I moved the image into Photoshop and used Topaz Simplify to create this stain glass version.



Above is a uncorrected version of an Oktomat camera 35 mm frame used to make the image below. In lightroom I cropped out a single frame and darkened the image. After moving into Photoshop, I used Topaz Detail to sharpen and boost colors in this final very grainy image below.



And finally below, I shot a series of images of the Luxor sign and combined into a pano in Photoshop. It worked perfectly and was very boring. So I took the five most important layers, rotated and free transformed each, and made my version of the falling tower of Luxor.

Today I came across a very good think piece video on the New York Times web site. "Sex, Lies and Photoshop" takes a great look at the extent that reality is retouched into fantasy by the media. "Perfect beauty can only be expressed by airbrush."

The question then becomes: Since these images are fantasy, are they art? And shouldn't the retoucher also be credited?

"Sex, Lies and Photoshop" Link.

Check out this video:


There are several videos on YouTube showing Bob Staake at work. He is using Photoshop 3, not CS3, but version 3 released in 1994. MacWorld has a great article on Staake titled "If it ain’t broke, don’t upgrade it." Lesson is results count, not the tools.

This week Scott Kelby on his blog announced that Robb Kerr has passed away. Kerr was one of the original Photoshop World instructors. I was lucky to catch several of his classes from the 2002 Photoshop World in San Diego.


The 2002 Photoshop World was my first of five that I have attended. I pulled out the notebooks (in photo) last night and reviewed my notes from the four classes taught by Kerr. Needless to say, I learned a lot from his Color Correction, Color Management, Black & White and Color Separation classes. He also taught three other classes at the two-day Photoshop World.

I just wanted to say thanks to Robb Kerr for his entertaining and in-depth photoshop instruction. You will be missed.

Scott Harrison