Can you believe that Adobe Photoshop turns 26 this year? It’s so hard to believe what designs and pictures would be like if we didn’t have this giant software to support us. But it was not always like this – kind of hard to believe right? Well, with the anniversary of Photoshop, let’s take a look at how Photoshop has managed to evolve over the years.

But before we can get to that, let’s update you on its back-story and how it was conceptualized. It all began in the later eighties when a PhD student named Thomas Knoll and his thesis. It was during this time that he thought – why not develop an image processing program for his Mac? Okay, that might not be what came into his mind but his thesis was about detailing the processing of digital images which led to this thought. Hence Photoshop came into being. Though at that time, Photoshop was not the full-fledged image editing program, his brother John suggested this option and they worked together to create it and in September 1988, the program was presented to Adobe and well, the rest is history.

Let’s take a quick look at how Photoshop has evolved since its inception and becoming the powerful image editing giant that it is today.

• Adobe Photoshop 1.0 – the new kid on the block, it was launched in the month of February in 1990 and quickly went on to define how an image editing program should be.
• Adobe Photoshop 2.0 – Arriving in June 1991, it brought with it color and loads of features along with the requirement of a 4MB RAM to run the program. It introduced the Pen and Path tool and a Windows version 2.5 was introduced later in the year.
• Adobe Photoshop 3.0 – Codenamed ‘Tiger Mountain’ this version was introduced in 1994 and saw the introduction of the most important feature – layers.
• Adobe Photoshop 4.0 – ‘Big Electric Cat’ it was named and was released two years after the last one and introduced adjustment layers and Actions (known as Macros then).
• Adobe Photoshop 5.0 – The ‘Strange Cargo’ was introduced in May 1998 and included the features Magnetic Lasso, editable type tool and the History panel.
• Adobe Photoshop 6.0 – A millennium release hitting the shelves in September 2000, saw changes in the user interface, liquefy filter, vector shape along with the improvements to layer style interface.
• Adobe Photoshop 7.0 – Released in 2002, it came with the Camera RAW plugin which added to the ability to manipulate digital data.
• Adobe Photoshop CS – The name was changed to adapt to the creative suite, released in 2003 saw the addition of customizable keyboard shortcuts and the typing on a set path along with Groups, shadows and highlighting effects.
• Adobe Photoshop CS2 – The ‘Space Monkey’ was released in 2005 and with that, the red-eye tool was introduced along with the spot-healing brush, smart objects and the vanishing point tool.
• Adobe Photoshop CS3 – A speedier version, saw image optimizations tools and improved support for Vista .
• Adobe Photoshop CS4 – Released in 2007, it came with a number of user-interface changes along with adding the masks panel.
• Adobe Photoshop CS5 – The ‘White Rabbit’ came in April 2010 and brought with it Content Aware fill, the Puppet Warp Tool and the 3D tools.
• Adobe Photoshop CS6 – Released in May 2012, it came with a huge performance revamp along with enhanced video editing and 3D as well as improvements to present features.
• Adobe Photoshop CC – June 2013 saw a huge change with the Creative Cloud release of Photoshop.
• Adobe Photoshop CC 2014 – Released in 2014, saw the inclusion of smart guides and smart objects along with the layer comps, color pucker that stays open, full Typekit integrations and a searchable font menu and other numerous changes.
• Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 – Latest versions saw a new launch dialog featuring list and thumbnail view of the recent files, library contents and document presets.