Photoshop is 25

An upcoming ad that will appear on the Oscars will celebrate 25 years of Adobe Photoshop. Loudly, I might add, so turn your sound down before you click the roll button.

Photoshop: a verb, and definitely a useful tool for photographers; I don't think I could get along without it. But as to its general overall contribution to culture, hmm...this commercial seems designed to induce a dose of ambivalence in people of a certain maturity. Although the music indicates the ad is aimed straight at the 50-and-over crowd.

No matter. Happy birthday, Photoshop. And congratulations to everyone we know at Adobe.

Mike

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TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Patrick Dodds: "Loudly in both senses."

Mike Farrell: "Congratulations, Adobe!

"This may come across as heresy to Photoshop's early adopters and those who've become proficient with it, but for me, Lightroom is Adobe's real gift to photographers. I've always found Photoshop to be time-consuming and unforgiving for basic image-editing tasks and was very pleased from the start with Lightroom's more intuitive approach—a workflow that takes me (after much practice) almost seamlessly from image selection to development to printing with highly satisfying results. Now I only open Photoshop if I want to add something graphic such as text or a custom border.

"Again, just my opinion. I know Lightroom has its detractors and others use a little of both programs. Camera Raw makes it possible to stay in Photoshop and still have access to 'non-destructive' edits.

"I'm curious, is it only a question of habit? Are the two programs just different means to the same ends or is there a reason many seasoned pros have stuck with Photoshop and stayed away from Lightroom? Might be an enlightening conversation/debate among your readers."

Comments

[Mick Ryan]

Great! Now all my clients will think I should be able to do this stuff at the click of a button.

[Jim Roelofs]

Roll on Serif! I want software, not bloatware.

[Chris Hunt]

25 years of swapping people's heads in pictures! I mean, what else have people done with Photoshop?

Chris H

[Joe Holmes]

"A dose of ambivalence??" Dear god that's hideous.

[robert e]

I don't think we can assume the target from the music anymore. Compared to those of us who came of age, say, 20-30 years ago, the under-50 crowd's access and exposure to the music of the over-50* crowd is far more comprehensive, egalitarian, and ubiquitous; far less restricted and curated; and less stigmatized. As far as I can tell, that openness is reflected to an extent in attitudes and listening habits.

[robert e]

As to Photoshop's contribution to culture, and reflecting on my previous comment--I'm not sure this counts as a contribution, exactly, but I'd say that Photoshop is a tool whose time has come, and a perfect metaphor for those times.

[Brian Chambers]

Just a brief observation about who the music is aimed at. I think today's generation is more age neutral when it comes to music. My 15 year old son will hum music from all the decades. He hears old music from movies and the internet and bonds to what he likes regardless of when it was made. The other day he was singing a Journey song. I couldn't stand Journey as a youngster and now here it is back again. He says it is popular at his school and "everyone knows that song" He has no idea when it was made and there is no sense of nostalgia like there is for me but he likes it and now and sings it just to bug me..

I bet he would love that Aerosmith song and that is something that wouldn't bug me.

[John Krumm]

You might be amazed at how many young people still listen to classic rock. Between classic rock popularity and contemporary rock imitation of classic rock I feel like time stopped somewhere around 1983 (when Japanese cars and motorcycles first started to appear modern in a new way to me).

[c.d.embrey]

Photography, as we know it, is dying. So it makes sense to aim the ad at the "old folks," the only group who still cares.

Apple isn't replacing Aperture. Much of what it does, is neither wanted or needed, by next generation photographers. Apple gets that the cutting edge is changing.

It will be interesting to see what Adobe does to remain relevant, in a world where computers are becoming passé. Where many will be doing "one-click" post on an iDevice.

[Dennis]

My 12-year old daughter loves AC/DC. That's cool. (She wants to go to an AC/DC concert. Not so cool.) I get the impression that music that "kids" listened to in the 50s & 60s was radically different than what their parents listened to, both in style and lyrics, whereas what's on the radio today just isn't all that different to me than what I grew up on in the 70's & 80's. Of course, I've been listening to music all along as it's evolved. There must be some reason that parents objected more to their kids music "back then" than they do now. My daughter is always shocked when her dad knows that Imagine Dragons does this song or Taylor Swift does that. You gotta listen to something when you commute an hour each way to work, and NPR isn't *always* interesting :)

I like the commercial.

[Michael (a Baby Boomer)]

Great product..great commercial..great song..Happy Anniversary Photoshop!

Aerosmith's "Dream On" was #51 on Billboard's Top 100 Singles chart in 1976...

Glad Adobe did not use George Michaels' "Praying for Time" which occupied the same position in the 1990 chart (the birth year of Photoshop)

Steven Tyler is still going strong collecting those royalties..
I am sure George hopes his span of fame and income lasts as long as Steven's

[Jack]

I still cherish an email from Thomas Knoll, the creator of Photoshop.

I had a stupid photoshop question 13 years ago and had posted it on the Adobe forum. The patient, kind, and accurate reply came directly from Tom.
Wow, I thought, the guy reads the forum, and takes the time to answer even the stupid questions. BTW, I had not seen him reply in the past.

So I printed, laminated, and saved that reply. It is next to my photography iMac. It reminds me Knoll is a good guy, and stupid questions someone so gifted answered were worth asking. Of course reading his answer also keeps me humble. No, I will not reprint my question.

[Roy]

For me too, Lightroom's vastly more useful than PS for everything except compositing. A pity then that it's an abominably slow pig of an application - incomparably slower than any other I use, even those that are ancient. Every time I fire it up the whole design of the program just irritates me - the interminably sluggish "importing" nonsense most of all.

[Nate]

The song is more commercial-jingle than actual music when it comes this context; at least to my under-50 ears.

[Stephen Scharf]

While the importance of Photoshop to digital photography cannot be overstated, IMO, it has become too bloated with features and complexity that the majority of users don't need or use.

Fully agree with AM and Roy regarding Lightroom. I've used Lightroom since the early Beta 1 days of 2006, and it has been a very much-used and consistent part of my workflow over the last 9 (has it been that long? Goodness) years. The only time I use Photoshop any more is when I have to do layer masking, compositing or run some sharpening actions that are not available in Lightroom. I also agree with Roy that LR is vastly more useful these days than PS, but it indeed it is too slow. It has ALWAYS been too slow, from the first day to the present and even with today's much faster computers driving it, it is still too slow. I don't know why Adobe cannot address this.

However, I'm migrating much more and more of my work over to Capture One 8 these days. It's remarkably like Lightroom in it's workflow, except it's much faster importing images (Phase One *really improved* this with version 8), supports real adjustment layers, has a superbly effective and simple keystone correction tool, and provides superior RAW conversion to any other app I've used. It's also has the best RAW conversion/sharpening capability I've used for Fuji X-trans files, and provides superior color (especially skin tones). You can also pull up shadow detail and pull down highlight detail with it without the contrast curve turning to mushy grays, often obviating the need for multiple files/layer masks for dynamic range recovery (not I am not using the dread "HDR word" here).

Images just look more natural, beautiful, and three-dimensional to me when converted with Capture One that anything else I've used, and that is regardless of the camera.

Most importantly, it's still a pretty lean and mean app; and has not become as bloated as Photoshop, or, as I fear, Lightroom is rapidly becoming.

[Gerry Winterbourne]

In reply to Mike Farrell's question about Camera Raw (ACR)v Lightroom, I find the ACR interface clearer and easier to use than LR. That's partly because most things are a little bigger, partly because I find it easier to access the tabs from the row at the top than down the side.

When it comes to selective editing I just prefer the precision of PS. The addition of the Camera Raw filter in PS makes the choice easier.

I gave up movies after a brief flirtation in the '70s and my file structure predates LR so I've not considered the wider capabilities of LR.

[Ed Hawco]

Add me to the chorus of happy Lightroom users. Frankly, I find most of the stuff in that Adobe clip to be be the modern-day version of those overly stylized and frankly quite cheesy airbrush paintings we used to see on the sides of Chevy vans in the 1970s. Ooo, unicorns and bare-chested warriors. Sorcerers and gleaming things. Everything a sunrise or a sunset. Pretty, but utterly meaningless (at least to me).

Nah. Give me tone controls, along with dodging and burning. That's all I need.

[Adrian Midgley]

I shall stick with The Gimp.

[ctein]

Dear Mike F.,

In the broadest possible terms (yes, people, I know there are some modest exceptions to this), if you only do global image adjustments, Lightroom will do the job. If need to do local image adjustments with any particular precision or detail, you turn to Photoshop.

Also, as a general rule, Photoshop plug-ins will not work with Lightroom or vice versa. So if there is a particular third-party gizmo that you are especially enamored of, that will dictate which program you need to use.

They are really serving different needs. Some people need one, some need the other, some need both.

pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
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