Okay, that headline’s a little cheeky: Photoshop does have a very close tie to Star Wars, but it didn’t exactly drop out of hyperspace aboard a rickety smuggler’s ship.
You see, before it joined the Adobe catalogue (that’s right, it didn’t start life there!), Photoshop was the co-creation of one Thomas Knoll and his brother John.
Brother John was, and still is, a visual effects maestro at Industrial Light and Magic – Lucasfilm’s magical workshop that gave us all the mindblowing eye-candy in Star Wars and hundreds of other familiar properties. (John is now their Chief Creative Officer.)
Thomas had kicked off the Photoshop project on his own, but he quickly pulled John into the business and, no surprise, the now popular ‘app’ has played a significant role in ILM’s work since its first film use in 1989’s The Abyss.
Indeed, such was the impact of Photoshop in film that, at the 2019 Oscars, Thomas and John were awarded Scientific and Engineering Award for the original architecture, design and development of Photoshop.
The connection to Adobe began quickly, however, as the boys sold the distribution rights for Photoshop to Adobe very early in its development.
The first copyright for Photoshop was issued in 1990, 35 years ago, but it wasn’t until 1995 that it fully became an Adobe property – when they paid $35 million USD ($72m USD in today’s money) to buy it outright.
The story of Photoshop’s development and feature growth over the years is as long as you’d expect for an app so old and so many versions deep, and you’ll find a great rundown over on Petapixel.
I know a lot of artists hate on Adobe these days, with their often buggy apps, massively expensive subscription costs and a wholehearted embrace of AI – and, well, that’s all fair enough – but Photoshop remains my go-to for many parts of my work.
Maybe that’s why I like to think about its origins more than its current home… it’s somehow more of a pleasure to be using a program that was created with such close ties to an all-time legendary group of creators.
Thomas still led development on Photoshop up until CS4, but since then it’s been all Adobe.
I’m old now, so I’ll probably use it until I’m done.
I use it daily, a lot, and I’ve even got this rad little version 1 metal brooch in front of my desktop monitor, clutched firmly by some utterly unrelated panda figure I picked up from PAX Melbourne a couple of years ago. 😂
Also, from the video above, can we talk about Photoshop lunatic Russell Brown’s logo bolo… eesh!
