Photoshop

“Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” snaps Groucho Marx in Duck Soup.

The film quip was prophetic. In the Photoshop era, your eyes may mislead.

Even knowing that images are easily manipulated, it’s natural to believe what we see. Photoshop introduced an unprecedented tool for shaping emotions, opinions, and actions, from art and advertising to propaganda, from science to selfies.

What happens when perfection becomes the norm?

By erasing blemishes and flaws in the images we see daily, are we creating a new, unobtainable standard of beauty? Is there a connection between the Photoshop era’s perfection and increasing rates of anorexia and plastic surgery?

We expect news photos to be authentic. We accept that advertising images are doctored. Between those extremes lies a hazy middle ground in which fantasy and reality sometimes overlap.

What are the political and cultural implications as photo manipulation gets easier…and separating truth from fiction gets harder?

Doctoring photos can distort reality. But it also can sharpen reality, an invaluable tool in labs, police precincts, medical offices, and elsewhere.

Forensic photography “ages” missing children, projecting how they might look today. Manipulating images can reveal cell structures, enhance satellite photos, or help plan plastic surgery.

Visual artists reinterpret the world around them, capturing reality—or creating new realities.

Which is also what Photoshop does.

The ability to manipulate images easily and effectively gives us a powerful new artistic tool. Today, if we can envision it, we can probably portray it.

Photoshop was an inspired marriage of math and art.

Digital pictures—like all computer data—are simply coded series of 1s and 0s. Numbers. Manipulating those numbers changes the way the computer draws the image.

The calculations involved are complex, but Photoshop's user-friendly interface lets people alter an image without ever seeing the math behind it.

We have been doctoring images since the birth of photography.

In the pre-digital age, people used many techniques, from airbrushing printed pictures to overlaying film negatives, from double exposures to literal cut-and-paste jobs. But no technique was as simple to use as Photoshop. Or as hard to detect.

Digital images are made of tiny picture elements (“pixels”). Photoshop lets users manipulate these almost limitlessly.

Photoshop’s strength springs from a user-friendly interface that lets people easily harness million of lines of complex code, and hundreds of powerful algorithms based on mathematical concepts such as the bi-harmonic equation and vector space color model.

John and Thomas Knoll grew up developing photos in their dad’s darkroom. So when Thomas got a Macintosh II in 1987, it was natural for him to try improving its photo handling abilities.

The result? A program called Display, which he and brother John (employed at special effects pioneer Industrial Light and & Magic) expanded into Image-Pro, forerunner of Photoshop.

The Knoll brothers’ photography program was promising…but not profitable. They licensed one version to a scanner manufacturer.

The big break came when Russell Brown, Adobe’s art director, became interested. Brown persuaded Adobe to help refine the Knolls’ software. Adobe released the expanded product—Photoshop—in 1990.