Adobe Celebrates 35 Years of Photoshop With a New Video Series

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Adobe marks Photoshop’s 35th anniversary with an inspiring YouTube series exploring photography’s evolution and the software’s game-changing impact.

Key takeaways

• Photoshop, launched 35 years ago, has revolutionized digital image editing.
• Adobe launched a YouTube series showcasing Russel Preston Brown and leading photographers.
• The series explores the transition from film to digital and Photoshop’s role in modern photography.
• Joel Grimes shares insights on how Photoshop enhances old negatives beyond darkroom capabilities.

35 years of Photoshop 

Adobe’s Photoshop is so dominant in digital photography that its name has become synonymous with image editing. 

As Photoshop turns 35, Adobe commemorates the milestone with an exclusive YouTube video series featuring its longest-standing employee, Russel Preston Brown, Sr. Principal Designer. 

This series will showcase professional photographers, their journeys, and the software’s groundbreaking impact on photography.

How Photoshop shaped the digital photography era?

For many, it’s hard to imagine a time before Photoshop. The software was launched years before digital photography became mainstream, meaning that even veteran photographers have spent most of their careers using it. 

Over the decades, Photoshop has introduced advanced AI tools and functionalities that early users couldn’t have dreamed of.

The first episode of Adobe’s celebratory video series features photographer Joel Grimes, a Canon Legend and FJ Westcott Top Pro Elite photographer. 

In the episode, he and Brown reminisce about photography’s evolution and Photoshop’s role in transforming the industry. 

They discuss the painstaking editing techniques of the film era and how Adobe’s innovations digitized and enhanced those manual darkroom processes.

Photoshop can make film negatives look better than ever

One of the most striking insights from Grimes is how Photoshop has enabled photographers to extract more detail from old negatives than was ever possible in the traditional darkroom. 

He shares:

“You made your negative. You made your print, and you would lose this huge amount of detail in the difference between what the negative had (and what) the print could (display).

The beauty of today is that even if I have my old negatives, I went back and re-scanned them.

I brought them into Photoshop, manipulated the tones, and ended up with images that I never even dreamed I could have had 33 years ago.

So you’ve taken a negative and enhanced it beyond what it was originally. We’ve gone beyond the darkroom.”

This revelation highlights how Photoshop doesn’t just replicate darkroom techniques—it enhances them, pushing the boundaries of what photographers can achieve.

The evolution of Adobe Photoshop

Alongside the video series, Adobe has published a blog post celebrating major Photoshop milestones, from introducing nondestructive editing with Layers to the revolutionary Healing Tool. 

These features, which are now standard, have made professional-quality editing accessible to photographers and designers worldwide.

Photoshop at 35: What’s next?

Adobe continues pushing digital creativity’s limits with AI-powered features and cloud integration. 

As Adobe celebrates 35 years of Photoshop, this series is not just a look back—it’s a reminder of how the software continues to redefine the creative industry. 

With the rise of AI and machine learning, the next decade of Photoshop could be even more transformative.

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