A Look Back at Photoshop 1.0

In celebration of Photoshop’s 25 anniversary photographer Terry White took the first version of Photoshop for a spin looking at what you could (and mostly couldn’t do with it).

Photoshop 1 was released in 1990. 25 years in the computer industry is a lot and boy did things change. Using a emulator White demonstrate what you could do using Photoshop 1.0 back in 1990 as well as a few of the things that you could not do. Among those you can find many things that you take for granted today such as:

Multiple undo/history – you only had one go at undo (at best) with Photoshop 1.0 so you better be careful with what you were doing and make sure you save a lot.

You had no layers in Photoshop 1.0 (it was introduced in version 3.0), you also did not have live preview or even something as basic as saving your image as JPEG (which was introduced around 1992), not to speak of Camera RAW which was introduced later (as there were no commercial digital cameras anywhere at that time). Of course there was also no real internet so the only way to get digital images was by scanning prints.

Still, there were quite a few things that you could do with Photoshop 1 that were quite revolutionary and you can watch some of them in the video and hopefully those will help you appreciate what we have today just a little bit more.

You can find many more Photoshop video tutorials on LensVid’s Photoshop section. You can check out Terry White’s previous videos on LensVid here.

Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.

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