displaying

Maybe with Nano Banana There are people who have banished Photoshop, but the image editor is the tool that has accompanied photography professionals for decades, almost on par with their camera. In fact, it achieved something only within the reach of very few technological products: becoming a verb and even enter the dictionary. We Photoshop an image and Google it on the internet. Like many other milestones, Photoshop was born by chance: It was the result of a screen that did not know how to show grays. In figures. In these almost 40 years of Photoshop’s life, the editor has been accumulating astronomical data of its progress. Its launch price in 1990 was $895. No joke, it would be equivalent to $2,100 today. It has never been a home software but a professional one. Adobe closed last year with record turnover of 23.77 billion dollars. In 2024 billing was of 21,510 million dollars, of which subscriptions represented 20,521 million dollars. In 2013 Adobe played all its cards on the subscription. Time has proven him right: in twelve years it went from 4,000 million annual billing to almost 24 billion in 2025. How it all started. It’s 1987 and Thomas Knoll was pursuing a doctorate at the University of Michigan in computer vision. Then he had a problem: his Mac Plus had a monochrome screen unable to display grayscale images, only pure black and white. So he wrote a few lines of code to fix it. He called it Display. His little program did the trick, but that was it: he had no intention of commercializing it. The one who did have a nose for the business was his brother John, who at that time worked at Industrial Light & Magic (George Lucas’ company in charge of making Star Wars special effects): convinced him to develop the entire program. Brothers and partners, they sold the license to Adobe Systems Incorporated in 1988. From layers to AI. Photoshop 1.0 would see the light of day in February 1990 as an editor that required only 2MB of RAM and an 8 MHz processor to run, the minimum specifications for a Mac. To put it in context: today Photoshop recommends 16GB of RAM, 8,000 times more. It included tools as iconic to its users as the lasso or the magic wand. But if there was a technical leap that made the difference, those were the very useful capes: they arrived in 1994 with Photoshop 3.0. Before layers, the editor was destructive: each change overwrote the original image. Almost 20 years later, another functional milestone would arrive: the arrival of AI with Generative Fillthat is, being able to add or delete objects with a prompt. Despite the controversy over authorship and the future of retouchingits numbers were incontestable: in April of last year it had already generated more than 22,000 million images since its launch, according to Adobe. The risky move to the subscription model. Before the tricky decision to include AI in its suite, Adobe made another risky move: in 2013 and when we had still succumbed in subscriptionocracyannounced that it would stop selling its Photoshop on a license forever and start renting it. At that time almost 50,000 customers signed a petition against of this decision and its shares fell 12%. Once again, time and pocketbooks seem to have proven them right: they have multiplied their income by six. In Xataka | 16 years ago a student from Barcelona was looking for an easy way to edit PDFs. The website he created is one of the most viewed on the internet In Xataka | 30 years ago he created a player for the university: today his app has more than 6 billion downloads and is still free and without ads Cover | University of Michigan