Digital Art

There are many applications for editing photographs, but the breakthrough program and still the industry-standard is PhotoShop. 

 

Photoshop was developed in 1987 by the American brothers Thomas and John Knoll, who sold the distribution license to Adobe Systems Incorporated in 1988. Photoshop was originally conceived to be a subset of the design software Adobe Illustrator. No one dreamed what it would become. (30 Years of Adobe Photoshop Design History - 101 Images, n.d.)

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Illustrator was for vector graphics and PhotoShop was for raster images. Vector graphic is artwork made up of points, lines, and curves that are based upon mathematical equations. This means that the images are scalable without losing any resolution. The lines, curves, and points remain visibly smooth no matter the size. 

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Rastor images are made up of pixels, (picture elements) also known as bitmap. A type of digital image that uses tiny rectangular pixels arranged in a grid formation to represent an image. When rastor images are scaled up or enlarged, the pixels become more visible. 

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The key to PhotoShop's power was its ability to use layers, allowing users to combine or composite images. It was magic. 

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A few years later, the programs began to merge features, with Illustrator finally getting layers in 1993 (“Adobe Illustrator,” 2020). PhotoShop got vector drawing capabilities and Illustrator got some rastor tools, but neither could ever replace the other. It was easy enough to work on files back and forth between the two programs. 

 

My first Adobe PhotoShop was version 2.5. It required five floppy disks to install the program. It was so slow to render that I would make a change and go and get a cup of coffee. Make another change and go to the bathroom. But the alternative was to work in an actual darkroom with film and chemicals. Electronic photo-manipulation was the future. 

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I was a member of the National PhotoShop Professionals (NAPP) for 10 years. I would go to their workshops and always wanted to go to their conferences but could never afford the time or money. They were wild, like Comic Con or South by Southwest. At midnight, they would have "Users-Nite." It was like an open mike for PhotoShop users to show off their tricks and tips that they were using with PhotoShop. The developers were at the back of the auditorium taking notes, because even they learned new things that they didn't know their program could do. 

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PhotoShop can do photo editing and compositing, digital painting, animation, and graphic design. At an FCPS Middle School, I taught students to create Hybrid Creatures using PhotoShop. 

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Adobe PhotoShop is still the most powerful and the industry standard. Now you cannot purchase your own copy, the only way to get it is through a Creative Cloud membership subscription. The cost is prohibitive for most people, but for school systems that can afford it, it is available in schools, usually at the Middle and High School levels. An individual subscription is $20.99 per month for just PhotoShop, or for $52.99 per month, you can have access to the full Adobe Suite (Creative Cloud Pricing and Membership Plans | Adobe Creative Cloud, n.d.) 

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I personally have discs of Adobe Creative Suite 5.5, when you could still purchase and own a copy of the software. It still amazes me with all that it can do. 

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Fast forward a mere 31 years and we edit our photos on our phones. Children in preschool can edit and manipulate photos on almost any electronic device available. For elementary school students there are plenty of free and low-cost solutions for photo and image editing. Microsoft Office's PowerPoint has fairly robust photo-editing tools, but cannot do much for photo compositing. Google Slides has some good tools as well. GIMP is a free (open source) image editing software that can almost rival PhotoShop, but the learning curve is much stepper.

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Resources:

How to Creatively Blend Two images in Photoshop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErDuKDNhYsI

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How to Use PhotoShop Beginner's Guide 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnSAnAolpmI

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References:

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30 Years of Adobe Photoshop Design History—101 Images. (n.d.). Version Museum. Retrieved October 25, 2020, from https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/adobe-photoshop

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Adobe Illustrator. (2020). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Adobe_Illustrator&oldid=984726185

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Creative Cloud pricing and membership plans | Adobe Creative Cloud. (n.d.). Retrieved October 25, 2020, from https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html

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How to Creatively Blend Two images in Photoshop | Photoshop Tutorial. (2018, December 5). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErDuKDNhYsI
 

How to Use Photoshop—2020 Beginner’s Guide. (2018, August 24). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnSAnAolpmI

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