Happy Birthday, Photoshop

About twenty years ago, Adobe introduced Photoshop. I've been using it for most of that time.

I'd first played with Version 2.5 on my uncle's Mac while I was over there one summer in grade school. I failed to be able to really do anything interesting with it, but it looked like fun.

Eventually, with some of my web designer income (back from when an understanding of HTML tags was enough to make a LOT of money) and picked myself up a copy of Photoshop 3.0, having reached many of the limits of Paint Shop Pro. This would be sometime around 1995.

With the rebranding and everything, I tell folks I've been using Photoshop "since three" and they think I mean CS 3, the last version. But no, Photoshop and I go way way back.

I upgraded to 5.0 in 1998 and haven't bothered to upgrade since.

On the other hand, this places me as being a Photoshop user for 3/4 of it's existence.

It's been a standard. Competition has come and gone over the years, but Photoshop has remained the standard, to the point where Adobe has to contend with people using the term "photoshop" as a verb.

With it, all sorts of work has been done. Ranging from cleaning up scanned photos to creating new art to creating some offensive forgeries. It is truly a great tool, itself ethically neutral but enabling both the pinnacles of greatness and the depths of horrors to be perpetuated.

I figure that I really ought to upgrade one of these days. I figured I'd buy every other major version... but I don't do anything like web development and it largely serves my needs for touching up scans and born-digital images, so I haven't gotten around to it.