Photoshop is the raster image editor 📝Adobe first shipped in 1990 that became the standard tool — and the verb — for editing photographs and composing digital images. Few products have defined a category so completely.
Photoshop began as a program written by brothers Thomas and John Knoll to display grayscale images on a monochrome screen. Adobe licensed it, then acquired it, and shipped Photoshop 1.0 in 1990. Layers, selections, masks, and a deep tooling of retouching and compositing turned it into the professional standard for photographers, designers, and digital artists, and its file format and techniques became a shared language across the whole industry.
Today Photoshop runs on desktop, iPad, and the web as part of 📝Creative Cloud, and it now folds in generative AI through 📝Firefly-powered features like Generative Fill. It remains the anchor of Adobe's creative tools — the place most people first learn what digital image-making can do.
Photoshop became a verb, which we hold as both a gift and a responsibility. Our job is to keep it worthy of that trust: powerful enough for the professional, welcoming enough for the person opening it for the very first time.