ICM - Leeds Design Agency

Photoshop turns 20 this week, the product that has become the byword for picture editing, and is seemingly ubiquitous in the modern world.

Adobe, the company behind the software, are going to conduct a celebratory broadcast bringing together the team that first created Photoshop to discuss and demonstrate their work.

In a recent interview, Shantanu Narayen, President and Chief Executive Officer at Adobe, said: “For 20 years Photoshop has played many different roles – it has given creative people the power to deliver amazing images that impact every part of our visual culture and challenged the eye with its ability to transform photographs.

“It’s no exaggeration to say that, thanks to millions of creative customers, Photoshop has changed the way the world looks at itself.”

In 1987 Thomas Knoll developed a grayscale pixel imaging program that blossomed into a way to process digital image files. Called Photoshop, it was licensed by Adobe, with the first product hitting shelves in 1990. Knoll recalled that originally Adobe expected to sell 500 copies of Photoshop a month.

“We knew we had a groundbreaking technology on our hands, but we never anticipated how much it would impact the images we see all around us,” he said. “The ability to seamlessly place someone within an image was just the beginning of Photoshop’s magic.”

Here’s a look at how the main tool palette has evolved over the years:

So what has made Photoshop the industry standard?

For one, it integrates perfectly with other Adobe software for media editing, animation, and authoring. The .PSD (Photoshop Document), Photoshop’s native format, stores an image with support for most imaging options available in Photoshop. These include layers with masks, color spaces, ICC profiles, transparency, text, alpha channels and spot colors, clipping paths, and duotone settings.

The software’s popularity means that the .PSD format is widely used, and it is supported to some extent by most competing software. The .PSD file format can be exported to and from Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere Pro, and After Effects, to make professional standard DVDs and provide non-linear editing and special effects services, such as backgrounds, textures, and so on, for television, film, print and the Web.

Photoshop can utilise the color models RGB, lab, CMYK, grayscale, binary bitmap, and duotone. Photoshop has the ability to read and write both raster and vector image formats such as .EPS, .PNG, .GIF, .JPEG, and Adobe Fireworks.

It really has to be in every professional creative’s toolbox. With CS5 due out in mid-2010, rumoured to have new 3d brushes and warping tools, there seems to be no end to the continual development.

Here’s to the next 20 yea…

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This month is Bubble-wrap’s 50th Birthday.

First invented by Marc Chavannes and Al Fielding, they weren’t looking for the solution to packing fragile items, they were creating textured wallpaper.

A classic case of searching for one thing but discovering something else. Sometimes losing sight of your goal can have a happy result.

The official licensed manufacturers of Bubble wrap, Sealed Air, have global revenues of over $4bn.

For an amazing insight into the world of Bubble wrap you should really ‘pop’ over to Virtual Bubble Wrap.com where you’ll learn about methods, etiquette (such as ‘Don’t pop someone else’s bubble wrap without permission’) and various methods to get the most out of your Bubble Wrap experience.

You’d never have that much fun with textured wallpaper now, would y…

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Good design stands out. Fantastic design (coupled with imagination) stands out, smacks you in the face and steals your wallet. The guys and girls (and other creatures) that work at the Weta Workshops in New Zealand create such things to make sure that you can’t afford food or pay your Mortgage.

But Honestly – food is overrated in comparison to the stuff conjured up by Weta . . .

For a sample I recommend heading over to Dr. Grordbort’s Infallible Aether Oscillators website and becoming financially poorer – yet immeasurably cooler and better armed than at any time before.

For those of you that do not know – WETA Group of companies comprise of two distinct arms – Weta Workshop and Weta Digital. In a nutshell – they create, that the only way I can describe them. The workshop make stuff (in the real sense) and the Digital side make . . . well . . . digital stuff. Both the websites are fantastic and you will be amazed at how many things or places you will recognize, from film, TV and Theatre – to Games and Public Art. The websites have tonnes of detail about the processes and projects that they have worked on, detailing cutting edge technology and techniques – combined with skilled craftsmen and women to make . . . erm . . . stuff . . . Just go to the website and you will see what I mean.

Anyhow – its just a front to cover up the fact that they are magical diamond encrusted Dragons from Pluto and are using the website shop to distribute their far superior technology to their agents across the globe.

Thats why I am getting thinner for a few months and buying A FREAKING RAY GUN!!!! . . . This one in fact “ Or this one

Ooh – I can’t make up my mind – which one of you future minions people choose? Comments and groveling words of submission below plea…

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