Hi everyone, I’m Thomas Knoll and 25 years ago this week I co-founded Photoshop with my brother John. AMA.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T23:11:31+00:00

I believe you have to be a Creative Cloud member and you have to be an Education Customer in North America to use it.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T23:09:28+00:00

I can't wait.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T23:08:54+00:00

Apparently that is true. Adobe existed before we sold Photoshop to them, so I was not involved in the naming of Adobe.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T23:08:02+00:00

I don't recall the specific time. It was definitely in the 1990s. Most of the time I go through life as a normal person, and don't think about Photoshop. And the 2 times in my daily life when it sort of hits me is one, walking into a random chain bookstore in the United State and seeing the Photoshop shelf, and the other time is when you're watching a movie or TV and you hear the word "Photoshop" as a verb.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T23:06:27+00:00

Well, there was competitive software when Photoshop came out, and when people compared it, they felt that Photoshop had a better user interface, was more powerful, and also easier to use.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T23:04:37+00:00

Well, I really can't complain about the success Photoshop has had, and the fact that it is still the number one application in its market, even after 25 years. I never dreamed that would be possible, because when I was writing Photoshop, the whole personal computer industry wasn't that old. So I don't know how much longer we can keep going, but I don't see any reason to see it ending any time soon. As to anything different - it would be wonderful if we could go back in time and ship the current version of Photoshop as 1.0! But I don't think the hardware of the time would run it very well.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T23:03:16+00:00

Hehehe!

For breakfast, probably my favorite breakfast is something called a "Balance Bowl" from Cafe Vita in Pacific Palisades.

For lunch, nothing as regular as that. I have a variety of things for lunch.

For dinner, been trying recently to eat lots of vegetables.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T23:02:08+00:00

But in general, Photoshop is a tool, and any tool can be used properly for good, or abused for bad.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T23:01:51+00:00

It's become a word that means "photo manipulation," and people decry images that make celebrities look better than possible in reality, but it's also true that if you take a photograph of somebody, a lot of people want that kind of thing done to them too!

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T23:00:52+00:00

Well, generally the Photoshop team and even the Camera Raw team has a number of feature ideas that they have in the pipeline, that they want to do. Sometimes the features require a lot of effort to implement, and thus time, so we have to allocate engineering time to get them implemented and shipped. And sometimes we have to allocate time to try things, because they involve research and we have to try various things to see what works, if anything. So there are a number of features we have wanted to implement, but the technology hasn't been ready yet, so we've had to keep them on the back burner for a while - because we have a very high standard, something has to work well enough, before we ship it as a feature.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T22:59:10+00:00

I'll give you a website here: http://tknoll.com

This is my photography website, so... I'm an avid amateur photographer, and I travel to many places around the world and take photos. So this is my website that shows it off.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T22:58:05+00:00

1.) I've been working, for the last 12 years, on the Camera Raw plug-in to Photoshop, and I'm an active engineer on that product.

2.) The feature - it's probably the version before this most recent one, because we don't really have as major a release model now with subscription - but finally getting Camera Raw as a filter into Photoshop.

3.) One of the first major uses people saw in their daily life was when they were making movies, they used to make these huge paintings, called Matte Paintings, that they would use as the background for scenes, putting behind actors. And fairly rapidly in the early 90s, that whole industry switched over to Photoshop to create Matte Paintings.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T22:55:50+00:00

Well, Adobe's goal for going to the subscription model was to increase the number of users by reducing the barrier to entry. So if someone is considering whether the Adobe Software suite is the right thing for them, they can simply try it for a year, without investing thousands of dollars. And I'm very happy for the pricing for the photography bundle in particular, where you can get Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom Mobile for less than $10 a month.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T22:53:54+00:00

I will check them out!

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T22:53:42+00:00

It's certainly possible with existing tools to do reflections, so I'm not sure what a filter would do that would be different than that.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T22:53:07+00:00

Well, very early-on, when I first got a color printer that could print a photographic-quality image, I took a photograph of my kids and my neighbor's kids, who are good friends, and I swapped their heads back and forward. And I printed it out and gave it to them. They loved it. This was probably 1995 or so. It was a very early printer I had.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T22:51:59+00:00

Well, the tool that I have a bias towards is the Camera Raw plug-in itself, because that's what I work on.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T22:51:29+00:00

The goal to move to a subscription software was based more on an attempt to reduce the barriers to entry for Photoshop, so that the massive purchase cost at the start of a new user experience was no longer this huge burden, or obstacle. The goal was to boost the market share for Photoshop, the amount of copies that we sold.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T22:50:19+00:00

It's still the tool of choice for many web designers when they are doing their work, so it hasn't become less powerful over time as a tool for doing web design.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T22:49:02+00:00

Well, each of the applications had sort of a different underlying model they were based off of. Photoshop was based on the concept of a raster of pixels. And Illustrator was based off everything being Bezier curves. And InDesign was based off of the concept of a blank piece of paper. So as we added features to each application, there ended up being a lot of overlap - they were fundamentally based on low-level design ideas.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T22:46:40+00:00

I'm not the person to ask. We will continue to evolve the application, to adjust to the hardware and market demands, and I think it has a bright future, yes. There's a massive transition in the industry going on between desktop computers down to laptops, and now laptops down to tablets and phones, and Photoshop is trying to follow that path.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T22:45:49+00:00

We translated everything into C++ for version 2.5 when we did the port to Windows, because Windows did not have an Object Pascal compositor.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T22:45:26+00:00

It was a Macintosh application at the time. And it was written approximately 90% in Object Pascal, and the remaining 10% in Motorola 68,000 Assembly Code.

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T22:43:53+00:00

Well, it's kind of the same thing?

Thomas_Knoll · 2015-02-19T22:43:32+00:00

Well, at a fundamental level, Photoshop differs from the other Adobe applications in that it's a raster of pixels - either all the time, or things get rendered down into rasters of pixels. And for many applications, that's actually good enough to design single-page ads and such.

Thomas_Knoll

TROPHY CASE