The Today Show Adobe Photoshop Debut

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9 жыл бұрын

Today is the 25th anniversary of Photoshop.
When this ground breaking software was first released The Today Show reached out to me to be interviewed about the new ability to digitally manipulate photographs.
At that time our book "A Day in the Life of America” had just hit #1 on the New York Times best seller list but there was a controversy about the book's cover shot by brilliant National Geographic photographer Frans Lanting. My business partner David E. Cohen and I had commissioned a very expensive high end retouching company called SciTex to alter the cover photo to fit the dimensions of the book.
The reason I was invited to appear was because Fred Ritchin, another guest on the show, had criticized us in his book “In Our Own Image” for altering the image.
The Today Show’s original plan was to feature SciTex but I showed them some spectacular examples of how Photoshop 1.0 worked and persuaded the producers to drop SciTex and to instead invite Russell Preston Brown, Adobe’s Senior Art Director.
It was 6:30 am and before the show the three of us were back stage in the green room. Russell and I were both really nervous, I was pacing up and down and driving Russell crazy. Seconds before we went on the air, a little light bulb went off in my head and I turned to Russell and asked if he had a copy of Photoshop on a disk. He said yes but assured me it was already installed on the Mac they had on set.
I asked him to give me the disks.
He said (nervously) “Rick what are you going to do?”
I said “Don’t worry, just give me the disks”.
At the very end of the interview, as Deborah Norville was trying to wrap up, I pulled out the disks making the point that “It used to cost a million dollars two years ago but now with Photoshop and a Mac anyone can now do this at home for $800.”
I heard from Adobe CEO John Warnock later that day that the entire staff of #Adobe watched the interview in their cafeteria and broke out into applause at the impromptu ad!
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***Edited:02/24/2015

Пікірлер: 16

@SilenceKillsDesign 9 жыл бұрын

This is GREAT. I often hear this same debate today-25 years later.

@MichaelMa 9 жыл бұрын

That's some good blending on the fingers.

@jackkraken3888 5 жыл бұрын

The problem of this clip is how they make digital technology the demon, but then go on to show how this was already being done at a professional level before Photoshop, the difference now being in how easy it would be done. But they also do have a point, with this ease there do come questions and an ethical quandary that to this day isn't really solved. And even though its ubiquitous with what seems like virtually everyone photoshopping their images, it doesn't mean its ok or its supposed to happen. We chose this reality.

@alunantu 9 жыл бұрын

Well. It seems to me that the argument made in this video in favor of classic photography is invalid. Ever since the dawn of photography, artists manipulated the contents of negatives, especially for press and propaganda. Most of the tools available in Photoshop (now and back then, too) were digital adaptations of dark-room techniques. Without a century or so of manipulating photographs, we wouldn't have modern digital tools such as "burning", "dodging" etc. The guy that's taking the conservative stance in this video either knows little about the history of photography or he is willingly ignoring a part of it.