You’ve heard it. You’ve probably even said it: “Can’t you just Photoshop it?” Maybe that’s the benchmark for the success of a product––when your product name becomes a widely used and accepted verb.

February 18 marked the 20th anniversary of Adobe Photoshop. When Thomas and John Knoll developed their pixel-imaging program in the late eighties, I doubt they had any idea of the global impact of their efforts and that they would still be on the cutting-edge 20 years later.

The computer age has obviously had a huge impact on the advertising and design industries. Photoshop may well be the biggest player in the transformation to what the business is today. I have been an art director/designer since graduating from college in '86––back in the days of airbrushed photographs and cutting amberlith overlays to knockout the background of an image. College graduates today have no idea what amberlith is. Nor should they care. I remember seeing posters of the Memphis Tigers basketball team featuring outlined head shots of all the players that looked like they had been cut out with a pair of dull hedge clippers. Thanks to amberlith.

My personal introduction to Photoshop was version 2.0. It was loaded on my Mac IIsi with its whopping 8mb RAM and 105mb hard drive. Photoshop has always done great things, but 2.0 is barely recognizable as the Photoshop of today. You could do photo editing work on the desktop that previously was done only by engravers, but using it as a design tool wasn’t practical for a number of reasons. No layering capabilities. No work palettes. But the biggest reason for its impracticality was that the computer the average designer used simply couldn’t handle the size of the files. The afore mentioned Mac IIsi being a classic example.

The real transformation came in 1995 with the introduction of layers in Photoshop 3.0.  Software upgrades come out every year or two. Sometimes we dread them. Sometimes they just frustrate us because they move our tools around and add new ones we don’t know how to use. When Photoshop introduced layers in '95, designers around the world applauded. I recall being commissioned to do an interactive CD ROM that year for a record company that was on the cutting-edge of interactive music CDs. The interactive screens had to be produced in Photoshop and had to be done in three days. Like being in the presence of a hungry grizzly bear, I tried not to let the client sense my fear. We left the meeting, purchased our 3.0 upgrade and spent the entire weekend reading the owners manual (how many people actually do that?). The rest is history.

We saw the future and didn’t look back. Fortunately the creators of this influential software development haven’t looked back either. Other notable developments include introduction of the history palette, totally vector text and more integrated tools with Illustrator and InDesign. That is just to name a few. Now we look forward to the next great innovation. What’s going to be the next “layers.” I, for one, can’t wait.

Innovations continue to expand our design horizons. Photoshop is an amazing tool. But, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that it can’t turn bad design into good design and bad ideas into good ideas. However, it can help us turn our good ideas into amazing productions. Some people long for the good ole days. When it comes to design, I kind of like where we are going.

Maybe Photoshop’s greatest accomplishment is giving us a new verb. Before settling on the name Photoshop the program was first called Display and then Image Pro. “Just Display It” doesn’t work because display has another meaning. “Just Image Pro it” just doesn’t have that special ring to it. “Just Photoshop It.” That just kind of works, doesn’t it?

Check out the video below entitled “Startup Memories” from AdobeTV:

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/photoshop-20th-anniversary/startup-memories