

Industrial Light and Magic was one of the first companies to receive Pixar Image Computers (which had been developed by the Pixar employees at LucasFilm), essentially huge frame-buffers, before their commercial release in 1985. Thomas’ brother was very enthusiastic about the application, and Thomas was soon distracted from his thesis.Īt Industrial Light and Magic, John tried out his brother’s program and was impressed.
Pixar photo editor for mac plus#
The program did nothing but display color images and grayscale images on the Mac Plus through dithering.
It used a C Shell-esque command line interface. So he could do his research on his Mac, Thomas wrote a program called Display that allowed him to display grayscale images through dithering on the 1-bit black and white display. Unfortunately, unlike some of the much less expensive home computers of the time (like the Amiga, Commodore 64, or Archimedes), the Mac Plus was not capable of displaying images in color – or even grayscale. Thomas went to college, earned a BS from the University of Michigan, and started working towards his PhD at the school in computer vision, or, as the University of Michigan’s alumni magazine puts it, “the processing of digital images.” 3 Thomas bought a Mac Plus to work on his thesis. 2 John was able to apply his hobby to his career as he joined Industrial Light and Magic, a leader in computer graphics research and the corporate sibling to Pixar. From that moment, he “became an instant convert” to the Macintosh. Glenn replaced the aging Apple II+ with a Macintosh in 1984, much to John’s delight. In an interview with Apple, he said his father “was using it for research, but he mostly did that work in the evenings, so when I got home from school that Apple II was calling out to me.” 1 John immediately felt at home with the computer. His father had brought home an Apple II+ and made his living programming a mainframe. Learning to manipulate the color and exposure of the photographs he developed, John developed the skills that would later be applied in Photoshop.

He took more than just a passing interest in the hobby, since he began developing color prints – a very elaborate process compared to black and white film development. John took an interest in photography, developing his film in his father’s darkroom. The boys’ father, Glenn Knoll (a University of Michigan Ann Arbor College of Engineering’s Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences professor), had been an amateur photographer and an early adopter of micro-computers, passions that his boys eagerly embraced. Rather, it was developed by Thomas Knoll and his brother, John. Photoshop was not the result of an elaborate skunk works in the depths of Adobe. During the mid-90s, publishing and graphic design had supplanted consumers as the most important market to target, at least in the eyes of former Apple CEOs Gil Amelio and Michael Spindler.Ĭonsumer Macs languished as Apple poured resources into multi-processor Macs and ill-conceived operating system replacements for the Mac OS.Įven after Apple emerged from its crisis of the mid 90s, Photoshop remained immensely popular and has even been adopted as a verb for retouching or modifying images ( much to the consternation of Adobe). Adobe Photoshop™ was, for a time, the killer app for the Macintosh.
