Photoshop Turns 25 Years Old Today

In the past 25 years, nothing has affected our perception of images more than Adobe Photoshop. By allowing users to adjust, fix, tweak and wholly invent images, the software has worked its way into our portfolios, our family lives and our media consumption.

It’s staggering to think that it was released 25 years ago, on February 19th of 1990, when people still dressed like this:

The software came out at a time when a large part of the struggle was getting an image into a computer in the first place. Our older readers will recall that taking photos once involved driving to the edge of a parking lot and dropping a roll of film off at a little booth, which is actually reflected in the very first Photoshop icon:

You’ll also notice, above, that color didn’t even make it into the icon until Photoshop 2 (which was technically the third icon).

And how about the evolution of the toolbar? Most of you are familiar with the one at far right, below, but how far back to the left does your memory reach?

Then there’s what the software could (or couldn’t) actually do back then. In this video from 2010, Photoshop co-creator John Knoll recreates, complete with old-school computer and monitor, the very first Photoshop demo he gave in 1990:

Contrast that with what Photoshop can do now. While the video below shows just a few of the latest features, the software has become so absurdly powerful that a large part of the improvements have to do with helping you actually find and manage those features:

Of course, the power of the software still lies with the user who wields it; if you’ve got no sense of lighting, composition and scale, all the Photoshop in the world won’t help you. Case in point, this ham-handedly retouched photo of the more recent 90210 cast:

Ouch.