Ah, the awkward age of 23: When life starts throwing all those adult-sized lemons in your direction and you reluctantly make some sorry excuse for a watered-down lemonade. Luckily Photoshop has had its act together for quite some time now. After 23 years of pixel altering, the little editing program has become such a crucial tool that it's almost impossible to think of a digital world that excludes Photoshop. Not that there's anything wrong with images that come straight out of a camera, it just our lives a heck of a lot easier.
Originally released in 1990, Photoshop 1.0 was intended to edit images that were crudely digitized by big honking scanners that cost a fortune at the time. The initial version is extremely minimal in comparison to what we have today: There were a selection of about a handful of brush sizes and interestingly even some filters that are still used today. Most striking is that it lacked layers. No, the convenience of layers would not become a thing until a few versions later..isn't that humbling?
If you're feeling a little curious as to how they used to alter their pictures in the colonial era, The Computer History Museum has released all 130,000 lines of source code that were single-handedly written by co-founder Thomas Knoll. Little would he know that the little program he wrote would make such an important mark on photography. Why not celebrate 23 years by going back to the beginning?
February 19th is not only an important day for Photoshop, but also happens to be the birthday of Camera Raw AND Lightroom, who are turning 10 and 6 respectively. Without them you would probably still be sitting around waiting for whatever software that came with your camera to finish processing your raw files. Be thankful ;-)