The fact that it's a white lady, topless, anonymous, facing away from the camera. "Given its cultural significance," he says, "just from an anthropological point of view I thought it would be interesting to examine what values the image contains. The idea captured the interest of Dutch artist Constant Dullaart, who rebuilt the picture from screenshots of the video and made it the centrepiece of his new London show, Stringendo, Vanishing Mediators. Reading on mobile? Watch John Knoll recreate an early Photoshop demo
To celebrate Photoshop's anniversary, Knoll revisited these early demos in a YouTube video. Often he'd return to find that the programmers had cloned his wife.
#Photoshop fluid image software#
Knoll would leave a copy of the software in a package including the picture at the companies he'd visited. "It was pleasing to look at and there were a whole bunch of things you could do with that image technically." And maybe there was something in it that hinted at the kind of more perfect world that Photoshop might reveal. "It was a good image to do demos with," Knoll recalls. In this way, Jennifer in Paradise became the first colour image used to demonstrate the software they had started to call Photoshop. The only picture he had to hand was that 6in x 4in print of his wife in Tahiti. Visiting friends at Apple's Advanced Technology Group lab, Knoll took the opportunity to use one of their flatbed scanners, also rare devices then. The only problem was, with so few digital images available at the time, it was hard to demonstrate what their new application could do. "It was really just a hobby at first," he says, "but I kept asking him to add more features."Įventually they had something that John believed they could sell. Knoll began to chivvy his brother into pushing the application further.
So Knoll was somewhat taken aback when he visited his brother Thomas, who was reading for a doctorate in computer vision at the University of Michigan, and discovered that he'd developed some similar software that could run on a much cheaper Macintosh Plus. The Pixar machine cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and the image-processing software was so complex it required a specially trained operator. "The fact that you could take an image from film, scan it in and turn it into digits and then manipulate those numbers and put it back out on to piece of film – it meant that there was literally no limit to what you could do to it in the middle." At ILM, Knoll had encountered a cutting-edge piece of hardware known as the Pixar Image Computer, one of the first that could be used to manipulate images. But the image was to become much more than a record of a perfect moment.
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