Re/code:
Twenty-five years ago today, a software application called Photoshop arrived, promising photographers and graphic designers a new realm of digital possibilities. But my brother John Knoll and I didn’t realize at the time just how broadly influential our little piece of software would become.
When I began writing the code back in graduate school instead of focusing on my PhD at the University of Michigan, I had no idea what it would become or how it would be used.
Photoshop might be the most complicated software application I’ve ever used. It’s an amazing tool.
Photoshop is more complicated then it needs to be. It is now a piece of software that tries to be something for everyone and ending up to be bloated software that makes ease of use for photographers a joke. I use this and have to use it everyday of my work week as a photo editor and photographer for at least twenty years, but the first piece of software that will tell me what the CMYK value is in an image that still has layers and I am out of here.
Just a tired 2 cents worth.
Photoshop at first appeared to be something that was too complicated to conform to Apple’s UI guidelines, and that impression never went away for me. Reading about it before I first tried it, I thought it overkill at first, then realized what it was for.
Over the years, people like Kai Krause, Deke McClelland, and Dan Margulis would appear in magazine articles and peel away another piece of Photoshop’s kimono. At least one of them (probably McClelland) described the program as having at least three ways to do almost anything you needed it to do, depending on which method you were least uncomfortable with.
So I bought it (or got it free with a scanner purchase) and started using it. Or rather, starting using the relatively tiny subset of its feature set I needed every day or every week, with only the occasional exploration of a new capability as they become obvious enough to help me get my work done. Problem was, it suffered from the same feature creep and legacy UI crap that Microsoft products did. Modularity was never on the table for the MBAs who took over Adobe from the engineers who founded it.
It’d be hard to imagine not having to need Photoshop for print and Web workflows every other day. But a simpler tool would indeed be nice to have.
@Moeskido…
Just read Farhad Manjoo’s NYT article about Photoshop’s 25th Anniversary today, and toward the end he related in no uncertain terms that the Photoshop team were indeed looking to break the software into a more modular structure.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/technology/personaltech/photoshop-at-25-a-thriving-chameleon-adapts-to-an-instagram-world.html?_r=0
If only they had.
Thanks, I’ll have a look.