20 Years of Adobe Photoshop | Hacker News Reader

20 Years of Adobe Photoshop

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72 pointsjasim61 comments

Any history of photoshop is incomplete without this programmers hilarious and insightful comments/breakdown as he attempts to parse it [1]

[1] https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/master/XeePhotoshopLoader.m#...

Any chance it's that ridiculous on purpose, to make it hard to implement in competing software?

I think it's much more likely that it's an accumulation of "seemed like a good idea at the time" hacks, perhaps combined with nobody actually being in charge of the overall file format. On older computers, you could sometimes save significant save/load time and/or memory overhead by just dumping the in-memory structures/buffers to disk instead of having a nice serialization format/layer. Imagine what a file format looks like if a developer does this every time a new feature needs its own data in the file, for 20 years.

I think this is also true for PDF.

Wow! I just checked out the copyrights[1] for Photoshop CC, and Photoshop still uses a (a heavily-customized) MacApp![2][3]

[1] https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/photoshop-copyright-tradem...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/13/3959868/photoshop-is-a-ci...

[3] http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...

I just learned the other day that QuickDraw still ships in High Sierra. They just don't ship the headers in the SDK. There must be bits of Carbon/QuickDraw functionality still shipping in corners of important apps.

Pretty impressive for a graphics API that began in 1979 in Pascal and 68k assembly.

I liked the proliferation of other tools that existed back in the day, things like the Kai's Power Tools plugin for Photoshop. Some products such as Paint Shop Pro had the edge on Photoshop with features such as being able to read more images and have a finer control of what gets saved.

In some industries Photoshop was seen as just a toy. If you had an SGI workstation and you paid $40K a year to Avid to run Matador then you didn't look on Photoshop as a serious thing (it was priced at 1% of the price of the pro tools plus you needed a machine that only cost 10-20% of what your workstation cost). Photoshop broke down this barrier to entry as did After Effects.

There were good reasons to run the pirated version of Photoshop even if you owned the paid for version. Before the cut down versions of Photoshop came along you could buy a ridiculously cheap flatbed scanner that came with a legitimate full version of Photoshop. Then you could upgrade that to the next version that came along. That was how I ended up with a legitimate copy of Photoshop for so many years. Then I discovered things like inline SVG graphics and imageMagick. If you are working on the web then there are so much better creative tools to be working with than the desktop publishing applications of the 1990's.

I had an SGI and ran Photoshop on it. Weird time to remember, because Photoshop back then didn't have layers even! Last version on IRIX had them, but we were already looking at those sweet Windows boxes. As for seriousness of it - I don't remember anyone not considering it a serious software. Barco Creator was considered serious and Photoshop was disruptive.

It's sort of in the opposite direction, but I like Paint.NET as a free Photoshop replacement.

It's not nearly as featureful (as far as I know), but it's much faster, crashes less, and is vastly easier to use.

Paint.NET requires... .NET.

Allow me to help you...

FastStone Capture AKA FSCapture

It is the BEST screenshot capture program (I literally have tried them all)

It also includes an image editor that I've used thousands of times.

It is small, cheap and portable (keep it on your USB drive).

One of the few programs I have bought.

I liked Aldus Photostyler back in the day (mid 90s) for it's nice features for cloning between different images etc. But then Adobe bought Aldus and buried it.

I never heard of cheap scanners bundling full Photoshop. Surely you mean Photoshop LE or Elements.

You may be right, however, there certainly was an upgrade path from the scanner edition. This may have been when '4' or '5' ('n') came along, if you owned any version of n-1 then you got the £150 upgrade price rather than the full £450 sticker price as it was back then.

So you could get a £100 scanner that was in itself 'reduced' from say £200, with that you could get your nobbled version of Photoshop for free, plus some SCSI card that was 'free'. Then paying a mere £150 to get full and improved Photoshop was not a difficult purchase decision.

After getting lured in by the cheap scanner I was on-board, paying for all the upgrades until I discovered that command line image processing was much more fun.

At the time there were lots of these pricing anomalies, e.g. ways to get full MS Office starting out with some student edition. I even managed to upgrade Visio from a version provided free on a magazine, before Microsoft bought it.

Funny to think how 'clever' I thought I was back then getting 'bargain' software. Odder still is that I now use Microsoft's VS Code with vim keybindings running on Ubuntu totally for free.

Full version came with our HP scanner back in 1996 or so. It wasn't 'cheap' ($600?) but cheap scanners didn't exist then.

I still miss the time when I didn’t have to subscribe to Adobe Creative suite...

Adobe (accidentally?) released CS2 for free to everyone, complete with working serial numbers, when they shut down their activation servers a short while ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7754172

Their official stance is that the downloads are only for those with existing licenses, but then posts on the forum that said the same thing were deleted, and they continue to let anyone with a free account get the serials (for a while, an account wasn't even needed and they were just posted on their downloads page), without any verification that they've already paid for a CS2 license...

Despite behind rather old, even CS2 is probably "more than enough Photoshop" for a lot of people.

Edit: here's the actual page archived from Adobe, in case you find this unbelievable:

http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20130108024913/http%3A//www.ad...

> Adobe (accidentally?) released CS2 for free to everyone

My theory is that Adobe lost the ability to generate licenses -- those product activating serial numbers -- for old versions of software, so they just made it all free.

How could they lose the ability to create licenses? I can think of many scenarios: The one server that ran the legacy license code crashed, and they had no backups. Or they lost the database of who had which product and serial number, so there was no way to verify anything when someone needed to reactivite an old product or move their license to a different system. Or there was a new bug or incompatibility in their license generator, perhaps due to a server upgrade, but the source code for the licensing software was lost so there was no way to rebuild it.

By the way, they released a lot of products for free, not just Photoshop (see userbinator's link above), and most of them still run just fine on Windows up to Windows 7. The Mac serial numbers are much less useful since they were all for PowerPC versions if I recall correctly, so they won't work on any recent Mac.

I had to give up. I got tired of the CC app itself breaking and requiring reinstall way too often. And this is on two different platforms! To uninstall, I had to get an uninstaller for the uninstaller because it broke.

I got the trial for Affinity Photo and bought it after using it for a few days on both Windows and Mac. It doesn't have the pure power of Photoshop, but it's 95% there for my amateur use. Only $50 and I put it on all my home computers for that $50.

The sub for Photoshop is cheap, but all the anti-theft crap they have baked into it makes it a royal PITA to use.

This is the first time since PS 5.0 that I haven't had PS installed on anything at all.

/rant I do contract work and it’s ridiculous that some clients specifically request for graphics to be done on Adobe. When there are a myriad of other options now, like Affinity as you suggested, and Inkscape which I happen to prefer over Illustrator. And sometimes ad-hoc methods like online gif generators and filters are all you need for a simple job.

I'd stick with PS if I were using it in a professional manner simly because it is the standard.

Affinity Photo is perfect for me because it does 95% of what I want, and it has really good .psd support so all those gigs of .psds that I have can still be used. It is the first photo app that I'm happy with instead of using PS.

Sure, it has some warts here and there, and it's not as fast a PS...but Adobe has quite a long lead on them. They've done an admirable job catching up as much as they have, and they are constantly developing it, too.

It has a 10-day trial which is a healthy chunk of time to get used to it. I've been using PS since version 5, and I felt comfortable with Affinity Photo after a few hours. I'm not a professional, nor am I a hardcore PS user, but I am very familiar with it. 0 regrets switching so far.

> I'd stick with PS if I were using it in a professional manner simply because it is the standard.

And it will continue to remain standard until professionals demand the right to choose the program they want to work in.

Seriously, professionals whine all the time about Adobe but they aren't taking the steps to break out of the monopoly.

But what about that remaining 5%?

It reminds me of those that day that an iPad can do 99% of what you need to do. So to me, that says I still need a laptop for that last 1%.

True, iff you use that 1%. Most people never need Photoshop per se.

I do contract design as well and for some things there really is no competitor. I haven't heard of anybody seriously competing with InDesign since Quark XPress became not-a-thing-anymore.

I def prefer when contractors work in adobe, since then I can easily make tweaks to their work in the future.

Are you required to update yearly with Affinity Photo? I was initially bullish about Sketch App for CC replacement but unfortunately their business model isn't really consumer friendly either.

Sketch's annual cost gives you updates for a year, but if you don't renew you still have a license to run the app and updates up to a certain date. A professional will pay the recurring cost but most people would be fine paying for Sketch once and running that version for years. I still use Sketch 2 without issues.

If you don't renew Adobe CC, you lose access to everything. I think the difference is important.

Updating is optional. $50 is a one time purchase, but I don't know how they intend to handle major version pricing. No annual pricing, no subscription...just pay once and done.

No! Not only that, but you will also get updates up to version 2.0

It's on 1.6.x now, so you'll get 1.7, 1.8 and so on.

Cool stuff, never heard of Affinity Photo but looks great! You likely created a new customer for them!

What about Corel Photo-Paint?

I just bought the 2 Affinity apps late last week. They are incredible.

FYI they still do site licenses for schools(and my teacher said in rare cases businesses). My school has one. It's probably tricky to get get and probably costs similarly. http://www.adobe.com/howtobuy/buying-programs/education.html

I’m still using CS6 for this exact reason... There is literally no new features in CC that interest me, I just want a few tweaks and bug-fixes (little things like Camera Raw’s UI not being retina compatible, etc.)

I've been using Pixelmator, which is pretty nice too, but Affinity looks pretty sweet. I'll wait and download the demo when I have some time or a need to use it.

Thank you for pointing it out!

Just CS6 apps on my machine, and still going strong!

Same here. CS6 was the last release before subscription, and it's solid, with enough features for me, and I do quite a lot of image editing including using the animation timeline and 3D tools in combination with Premiere. If I need 4K video editing, I must use a different video editor though, the only downside, but I mostly edit in 1080p.

Every time I see Photoshop, I look for the launch/splash screen to see Thomas Knoll's name at the very beginning of the long list of credited names.

Without the software craftsmanship and skill of the Knoll brothers, there might not have been the dynasty of Photoshop.

http://www.drdobbs.com/a-conversation-with-john-knoll/184410...

What is still weird to me is this: Photoshop can't be used on a case-sensitive partition.

What's weirder still, is that fixing such a bug is unlikely to be very difficult --- I've had to port some Windows software to case-sensitive Linux, encountered the same problem, and fixed it by essentially making sure all the filenames it uses were consistent. No one seems to have had a go at doing this on the Photoshop binaries, or if someone has, certainly hasn't published anything about it.

This would have been so much more interesting if it had shown how the UI evolved over the years instead of the box art.

It's amazing how much of Photoshop's basic architecture descended directly from Bill Atkinson's 1984 MacPaint for the original Macintosh — from the window layout, toolbar palette, to many of the basic tool functions, bitmap zooming, even the icons.

MacPaint: http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/MacPaint-...

PhotoShop: https://elektronikgrafik.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/photosh...

Windows 3.1 paint had a very similar layout[0], probably "inspired" on MacPaint.

[0] http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/Windows-Vis...

Seeing all those splash screens hits me with some nastalgia! First one I remember was Photoshop 6.

I had a pirated version of Photoshop 4.0 off of Hotline (because every self-respecting teen had to have Photoshop), but I never actually used it until I purchased CS3 (in a boxed copy!) for work.

Before that I used a Mac shareware program called "Color IT!" that always seemed far more intuitive to me.

My first memory is of Photoshop 1.0 - that eye does ring a bell. My father had a old square Macintosh computer that ran it.

I also remember there was some game on it, a 2d train simulator.

I am normally a FOSS guy, but I have to give credits to Photoshop. I dabbled in retro hardware lately and I am using an iBook running on OS 9 with Photoshop 5.0. It's unbelievably powerful and most everything you want a competent image editor is there. I can still edit my modern pictures with what is provided in the program and it's really quick too. Oh, and what's more... You can run an even earlier of Photopshop, I think as high as 4.0 or something on classic-classic Macs, which have freaking Motorola 68k processors. I think the only feature I miss is editoable text layers. It's pretty darn amazing - if you don't have one, try running the thing on the emulator - Basilisk II.

No wonder the original authors boasted it as "High Performance Mac software." It's pretty freaking fantastic.

It's funny to hear people these days ask if the 12" MacBook can handle Photoshop or if the maxed out 15" MacBook Pro is needed.

We used Photoshop in the old days on 300MHz G3's with 64MB to do all the production work we do now. Sure, image effects can be rendered in real-time instead of waiting 20 seconds, everything is faster, it doesn't take five minutes to load a hundred images...

The editable text layers in 5.0 was the feature that I missed most whenever I had to go back to a machine with 4.0

Kind of sad that Photoshop introduced adjustment layers in 1996, and Gimp still doesn't have it. It's really a major feature preventing people from using Gimp.

It really blows my mind that GIMP doesn't have these yet. I've been using GIMP for almost 15 years and things like adjustment layers and better tablet support are the only reasons I have to use Photoshop for any heavy or experimental work.

I know with a project like GIMP your time is better spent making pull requests than making complaints, but I don't have the time and knowledge myself to contribute the features I feel are missing.

AFAIK they are using C + Gobject which doesn't help finding new contributors.

Non destructive editing is in their TODO list for version 3.2.

And for tablets, Krita is pretty good.

> On February 19, 2010, Adobe Photoshop turned 20 years old.

Wouldn't that make it 27 years of PS? That's quite some rounding going on in the title.

Judging by where the article ends, I’m assuming this was published originally in early 2010

It says "Updated March 03, 2017" But who knows what has been updated.

Not to mention that it stops at CS4 and not CC

I avoid installing anything from Adobe like the plague. Their software is the shittiest I've come across with awkward UI and a need to update every week or so.

Seriously? Some of their apps are rock-solid professional apps with good UX and (occasionally) no serious competitors. InDesign alone is a huge win.

Have you used Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom?

I've used both. Photoshop is stellar, but you need a very powerful rig. Lightroom doesn't make any sense at all. It's like it ignores your file system and tries to handle files its own way. Thank God I'm a programmer and I can afford not using any of them.

I much prefer to use GIMP! https://www.gimp.org/

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