Thomas Knoll of Photoshop Fame P e t e r E a s t w a y , G M . P h o t o g , H o n . F A I P P, F A I P P When you open Photoshop, from time to time
found out that there was already an application
you may have read the names of the software
out there called Image Pro, even though it was
developers responsible for the wonderful ap-
designed for a different platform.
plication that today is the backbone of profes-
sional photography. They are listed in small type
up with a new name, Photo Lab and my broth-
on the splash screen.
er started showing this around to a number of
software publishers.
The very first name on that list is Thomas
Knoll because it is Thomas and his brother John
who started Photoshop over 20 years ago.
once again, someone walked into their back
room and came out with an existing box called
In May 2013, Thomas Knoll, along with Art
“He was talking to the people at Vega and
Wolfe, Michael Reichmann and Kevin Raber at-
Vega Photo Lab!
tended the Phase One World Tour, an afternoon
of seminars and presentations put on by L&P in
naming problem and someone suggested Pho-
Sydney.
toshop. We thought that sounded like a nice
idea, but it’s hard to remember who exactly
During an evening forum presentation, Tony
“After this, we would tell people about our
Hewitt asked Thomas where the name Phot-
suggested it.”
shop came from.
At the time, this was only a working title.
“We didn’t really care back then because this
“Back in the early days when we were devel-
oping the product, the very first name was Dis-
was just to be a codename. We figured that the
play because all the operation would do is dis-
company we sold Photoshop to would do some
play images. It was just a display tool.
market research and come up with a much bet-
ter name.”
“Then my brother and I decided that if it was
to be a useful product, we had to add more
features. It had to become an image processor,
ing to Thomas, there was a long process of test-
so we named it Image Pro, short for image pro-
ing various names.
cessing.
adjustment Adobe made was to change the up-
“We started showing the application around
to a lot of different people and my brother
6
“We thought about it for a while and came
Photoshop was sold to Adobe and, accord-
“They were all awful and in the end, the only
per case ‘S’ to a lower case – Photoshop.”