photoshop PS CS4] Overview "Instructions for Use" photoshop is one of the most famous image processing software owned by Adobe.

Adobe was founded in 1981 and is one of the largest personal computer software companies in the United States.

Version History Founder In 1985, Apple Computer Company of the United States took the lead in launching the Macintosh series of computers with a graphical interface.

In the summer of 1986, Thomas Knoll, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, wrote a program to display grayscale images on a Macintosh Plus machine.

Initially he named the software display. Later, the program was discovered by his brother, John Knoll. His brother worked for Industrial Light and Magic (the company did special effects for "Star Wars 2"). John suggested that Thomas use this program for

commercial value.

John also participated in the development of early photoshop software, and he developed the plug-in.

During a product demonstration, someone suggested that Thomas' software should be called photoshop. Thomas was very satisfied with the name and later retained it. After it was acquired by Adobe, the name was still retained.

In the summer of 1988, John was looking for investors in Silicon Valley and found Adobe. In November, Adobe signed an agreement with their brothers for authorized sales.

Their first commercial success was to hand over Photoshop to a scanner company for sale, called Barneyscan XP, version 0.87.

At the same time, John continued to look for other buyers, including SuperMac and Aldus, without success.

Eventually they found Adobe's Russell Brown, Adobe's art director.

Russell Brown was already studying whether to consider another company's ColorStudio image editing program, Letraset.

After seeing Photoshop, he thought the Knoll brothers' program was more promising.

They verbally decided to cooperate in August 1988, but the actual legal contract was not completed until April of the following year.

A key word in the contract is that Adobe obtains a "license to distribute" for Photoshop, which means it is granted the right to distribute rather than buy out all copyrights.

This laid the foundation for the Knoll brothers to make a fortune later.

After the efforts of Thomas and other Adobe engineers, Photoshop version 1.0.7 was officially released in February 1990.

John Knoll also participated in the development of some plug-ins.

The first version only came on an 800KB floppy disk (Mac).

In the early 1990s, the printing industry in the United States underwent major changes, and pre-press computerization began to become popular.

The CYMK function added to Photoshop version 2.0 caused printing plants to begin to hand over color separation tasks to users, and a new industry, Desktop Publishing (DTP), was born.

Other important new features in 2.0 include support for Adobe's vector editing software Illustrator files, Duotones and the Pen tool.

The minimum memory requirement has been increased from 2MB to 4MB, which has a great impact on improving software stability.

Starting from this version, Adobe began to use code names internally. The code name for 2.0 was Fast Eddy, which was officially released in June 1991.

What 1.0 looks like The next version Adobe decided to develop a Windows version, codenamed Brimstone, and the Mac version is Merlin.

The strange thing is that the official version number is 2.5, which is different from the normal software release serial number, because the numbers after the decimal point are usually reserved for modifications and upgrades.

This version adds Palettes and 16-bit file support.

The main feature of version 2.5 is generally recognized as support for Windows.

At this time, the main competitor of Photoshop on the Mac version is Fractal Design's ColorStudio, and on Windows it is Aldus' PhotoStyler.

Photoshop was far superior to ColorStudio from the start, and the Windows version took a while to catch up.

The important new feature of version 3.0 was Layer. The Mac version was released in September 1994, and the Windows version was released in November.

Although there was another software Live Picture at the time that also supported the concept of Layer, and there were rumors in the industry that Photoshop engineers copied the concept of Live Picture.