Hard to believe, but today Adobe Photoshop officially celebrates its 30th anniversary (or birthday, depending on how you look at it)… The first version of Photoshop shipped on February 19th, 1990, at a price of US$895.00. Adjusted for inflation, in today’s dollars that would cost over $1,800! And as recently as 2012, customers paid $699-$999 to get Photoshop. Today, of course, there are tens of millions of users of Photoshop who can now pay $10 a month for the latest-and-greatest release of this iconic, industry-leading tool.
Indeed, the software has traveled a long way. When it first came out, Adobe predicted it would sell just 500 copies per month. Yet today, over 90 percent of creative professionals worldwide have Photoshop on their desktops. The original authors say they knew they had a groundbreaking technology on their hands, but never anticipated how much it would impact the images we see all around us. Adobe Fellow and Photoshop co-creator Thomas Knoll says, “Not in my wildest dreams did we think creatives would embrace the product in the numbers and ways they have. It’s inspiring to see the beautiful images our customers create, the careers Photoshop has launched and the new uses people all over the world find for Photoshop every day.”
The new 2020 version of Photoshop is actually release number 21.0 – so there have been twenty major upgrades of the tool since its initial release three decades ago. Over that time, we’ve seen incredible innovations such as layers, vector shapes, Camera Raw, spot healing, Smart Objects, the Adjustment panel, Content-Aware Fill, Puppet Warp, video editing, Blur Gallery, Camera Shake Reduction, Perspective Warp, 3D printing, Dehaze/defog, Select Subject, the genuine Photoshop on the iPad, and much, much more.
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And the future of Photoshop promises to continue the exciting trend, with exciting 3D Sculpting, VR Painting and Voice Assistant capabilities being sneak-peeked to customers, plus helpful advancements such as adaptive learning, higher-performance processing, Photoshop Camera, additional connected services, Sensei machine learning, advanced image processing, plus Photoshop running on even more platforms in the coming decade… Adobe pledges, “We will keep the magic rolling”:
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If you don’t yet have the most recent release of Photoshop, then you can easily get it (plus Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, all with ongoing product upgrades included) via Adobe’s popular $9.99 a month Photography Plan. If you’d like to try out these desktop applications first, then just download the fully-functional free trials to get started.
Or you can win a full year of Creative Cloud “All Apps” for free with a couple of great giveaways going on here and here.
So Happy 30th Birthday Photoshop – and many more!
Share the love with #PsILoveYou30.
See Also
- What are the differences between Adobe CC vs. CS6?
- Get free guide on Photography, Photoshop, Lightroom
- How to save 60% with the Student & Teacher Editions
- Download free Adobe books (choose over 30 titles)
- Don’t need full Cloud? Get PS + LR for $9.99/month
- How to join Adobe’s Creative Cloud for free
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