Photoshop at 20

Last Friday, Adobe Photoshop turned 20. I didn’t notice because, well, why would I? It is, basically, a product, a thing that’s sold (at a very high price…). With rare exceptions, one doesn’t normally take notice of the anniversaries of products.

Yet Photoshop is more than a mere product. Toward the end of the video above, John Knoll, one of the creators of Photoshop, talks about people coming up to him saying, “I have a career now because of Photoshop.” That’s no exaggeration. The software made it possible for computer-literate people to do what once only high-trained graphic artists could do using actual, physical tools.

In the early days, a distinction was drawn: “Graphic artists” took over from graphic designers. They were trained in most of the same techniques as in the past, and were the artists. “Production artists” were the folks who used the emerging technology to make the graphic artists’ designs printable. That was a situation that couldn’t last.

Eventually, the two merged and “graphic designer” and “graphic artist” became interchangeable names. That person is now far more likely to receive computer-based education and may not be trained in any of the old, manual skills that once were the focus of the trade. Photoshop didn’t create that change, but it did make it inevitable.

There are plenty of people—me included—who have made a career out of computer-based design using (mainly) Adobe products. Many of us have a love/hate relationship with the software—we love what we’re able to do (always more, better, faster), but hate the costs (always more to learn, ever escalating prices).

Still, for the career opportunities that Photoshop led to, and for the enormous creative opportunities it unleashed, it’s worth pausing and acknowledging its anniversary.

But my “birthday wish” would be that it didn’t cost so much.