In 1987, a student set out to fix a Mac problem, but the code spiraled out of control, and he ended up creating Photoshop

Thomas Knoll wasn’t looking for greatness in 1987. He was just annoyed.

The University of Michigan PhD student was deep into his computer vision research when he ran into a wall: his Macintosh Plus could only display images in black and white. No shades of grey. That was a real problem for someone trying to study how computers process visual information. So he did what any programmer would do: he wrote a little fix. He called it Display.

That little change made all the difference.


Display was really a neat trick. It twisted pixels to show greyscale on a screen that wasn't meant for it. Thomas saw it as a utility, a workaround. Nothing else. His brother John had different ideas.

The phone call that changed software history
At Industrial Light and Magic, George Lucas’s legendary visual effects studio, John Knoll was already contemplating the digital future of film. He saw the Display and knew what Thomas did not, that this was the beginning of something much greater.

The logic was simple. If you can turn footage into numbers and turn those numbers back into footage, you can do anything in between. John urged his brother to merge the scattered image tools into a single, integrated application. This wasn’t some grand vision; it was a practical request from a guy who was sick and tired of jumping between programs. But that simple request created the integrated workspace that Photoshop users still rely on today.

The brothers first called the program ImagePro, but another company already had that name. They landed on Photoshop. By October 1988, they had completed the first alpha version, Photoshop 0.63, which was never released to the public.

Why darkroom techniques were incorporated inside digital software
Once the tools were consolidated, there was another issue. In the late 80's monitors had inconsistent gamma settings. This meant that the same image would appear significantly lighter or darker depending on which machine you opened it on. They had to find a way to make up for that.

Thomas drew on something unexpected: his childhood in a darkroom. His father had taught him photography as a kid: chemical baths, paper grades, enlarger settings to adjust brightness and contrast. That hands-on darkroom knowledge became the Levels adjustment tool, Photoshop's first major image correction feature. An analog technique had been quietly converted to a digital slider.

All doors were shut, except at Adobe
Many tech companies rejected the Knoll brothers' pitch for Photoshop. Some said they had similar projects in the pipeline. Others said they weren’t focused on image editing.

Adobe was different. In 1988, the brothers sold the distribution license to Adobe Systems, and on February 19, 1990, Photoshop 1.0 was released, initially for Macintosh. The list price was $895, pitched directly at design agencies, publishers and graphics professionals. That first version already had tools that felt like a revolution: the Lasso and Magic Wand, which allowed the user to select and isolate parts of an image in minutes instead of hours, and set a standard that rival programs would spend years trying to copy.

Adobe had only expected to sell a handful of copies a month, and their expectations were tempered further by concerns about whether the personal computers of the early 1990s had enough memory to run it. But it didn't matter: the software sold well (well enough to drive sales of newer, more powerful PCs). It was recognized as one of the first “killer apps,” meaning software so compelling it actually influenced hardware purchases.

The software that had to wait for the world to catch up
And here’s the part that’s easy to miss: Photoshop was an early product. Consumer digital cameras didn’t exist in 1990. There were no cheap printers that printed pictures. Getting a Photoshop image into print meant generating film separations and running them through a commercial press, a process that could cost thousands of dollars an image.

Then the internet changed it all. Web designers had to process and compress images and Photoshop was right there. Then came the inkjet printers and photographers could edit at home and print on their desks. Then came consumer digital cameras, which dumped image files directly into computers, no scanning required. The software had been ready for years. The market just caught up to it.

Eventually Photoshop became an integral part of publishing, web design, medicine, film, advertising, engineering and architecture. Adobe bought out the Knoll brothers' full rights to the program in 1995 for $34.5 million.

The original code was only 100,000 lines long. Today's Photoshop has over 10 million lines. Adobe later gave the source code of Photoshop 1.0 to the Computer History Museum, where it remains as a landmark of computing history.

Not bad for a grey-scale hack by a frustrated grad student.