One level of undo, no layers, and no paths if me remembers correctly. Oh the joy... oh the Power on my Mac IIcx, oh the sleepless nights waiting for a single action to take place.

I remember very clearly first seeing Photoshop 1 demo'd at Macworld. I took my copy home and just clicked, over and over, in amazement at the Clone tool. Silicon Beach's Digital Darkroom had been really good, but Photoshop had all these seemingly magical capabilities.

My first use was with 2.5. It was hard to make my ideas come to life. Once layers were born, I didn't care if they ever added another feature, ever.

My first memory of Photoshop was trying it out on a IIci at a computer store in Minneapolis when it first came out. There was a sample image of flowers in a bowl in glorious 24-bit color. It looked like a real photo, not like the dithered 256-color crap I was used to. I played around with the rubber stamp tool and brush tool. It was so fast compared to anything else out at the time (like Digital Darkroom, which was slow as molasses--and only grayscale!). I bought it immediately, even though I didn't have a 24-bit card in my Mac II yet. Still have the disks.

I first used Photoshop at version 3. My summer job was at a grad studio and they had this program but no one used it except the graphic designer. Without any training I was able to copy and flip an eyeball in a grad photo where the person had a closed eye. I was impressed the program was intuitive enough to do a lot without much training.

Before that, I used SuperPaint in high school for digital illustrations. That's an app I wish would still run on our Intel Macs, just so I could play with it again from time to time. :)

Ha! How wonderfully things have changed! I paid $500 for a scanner just so I could get Photoshop 2.5. And right off the bat I wanted layers before I even knew what they were!

Got it when it first was released to use with the corporate design projects I was working on. Probably first made grayscale drop shadows to place behind 4/c images, which before then had to either be airbrushed (a real air brush, btw) or created created on a 'high-end' Scitex machine.

Later, remember scratching my head trying to work my way through Kai Krause's tutorials before the day of mega filters.

I also bought a scanner just to get Photoshop (back when they bundled the program). 3.0. If you added text you couldn't move it, resize it or do anything except delete it and try it again. Began teaching Photoshop when it was 4.0...students could put an entire semester's work on one floppy disk and a 50mb photo could (and did) crash the program.

I had been using Scitex computers for years and DS America before that (since 1988) and so was very skeptical about having to switch to Photoshop. Now that I'm used to it, there are only a very few things that I miss. And of course having layers has become essential! FYI, channel mixer was originally a Scitex function called Transcol and was greatly missed before Photoshop added it. I'd never go back.

It was in 1998. It came with my UMAX scanner...or rather I bought my first scanner with my first copy of photoshop. Apparently it was the last full version of Photoshop was ever shipped with a scanner.

The version was 2.5, which had just come out.

The Mac was a Quadra 700 with a whopping 32 megs of RAM, running at a blazing 25 MHz.

The storage medium was a 44 MB SyQuest.

The waits were long, but the Mind was blown.

I had Photoshop 1 and 2, but didn't take it seriously in its early incarnations. The program that caught my fancy was ColorStudio (sold by Letraset, the company that made its dough in the rub-down type business before the computer made that product obsolete). That was the early 1990s.

The feature that really made ColorStudio revolutionary was the alpha channel. You could work with a background image and a "floating" image, each with its own alpha channel - like being limited to two layers in Photoshop.

However, once you saved a ColorStudio file, the floating image and the alpha channels all collapsed into a flat image, which necessitated saving all layers and channels as separate files and keeping copious notes. If revisions needed to be made, the composite image had to be rebuilt from scratch! Still, ColorStudio was king for a year or two at most.

Then when Photoshop version 3 came out. It had layers and channels (I don't remember if that included alpha channels attached to each layer). Photoshop could finally compete with ColorStudio. That's when I made the switch to Photoshop for good.

It wasn't long before all of Letraset's software products withered and died - probably right about the same time the Jasmine hard drive did the same.

Those were the days when I had a Mac II, and an 8" x 8" 300 dpi photo montage took a 3-day weekend to complete. Now, I could complete a similar project in just a few hours. At least, I learned to play the fiddle in the 90s while watching the status bar creep forward.

David Lynch
Lynch Graphics, Inc.
www.lynchgraphics.com

No, that wasn't an encapsulated PostScript file, that was the Executive Presentation System, a DOS-based machine I used to create presentation slides ... slowly. I was being trained on that monstrosity in Atlanta, GA, when our rep demoed Photoshop to me. He had a football game photo and rubber stamped the football under one guys arm and added another ball to another player in the same image. I was hooked.

I remember back in 18 aught whazziz when we got our first computer. It was a mac IIsi had a whoppin' 4Mb of ram and a 40 Mb hard drive. We were all wondering what to do with all that storage space. Photoshop was version1.2. Hey modem speed was 16 baud.

God I miss it.

Back in the mid- to late-80s, the LaserWriter was the best output device available for the Mac. Then came *insert heraldic trumpet fanfare here* The Linotronic Machine!

Finally! 1200 dpi output on lithographic paper or film. I was in Los Angeles at the time, and for quite awhile, there was only one machine in town - at a little funky place called "State Rubber Stamp", out in the San Fernando Valley.

The guy who ran the store was a wiry, irascible 60-something from the East Coast who also had a hot metal typesetting machine running in the back room. You could hear the little metal letters going chank-a-chank through the wall - talk about the new technology meeting the old!

There was no transmitting files via modem - you had to bring a disk and then pick up your job later. Luckily, the guy who ran the place liked me, and often gave me while-you-wait service if I looked particularly desperate.

All too often, we'd watch the green light blink for 45 minutes on the Lino machine, praying that it wouldn't unceremoniously purge my job (as it often did when processing Quark files).

On a few occasions, I showed up at the wee hours to pick up output, and would be startled to find the store owner parked in a chair next to the Lino machine, smoking a pipe, buck naked. "I suppose I should have told you I'm a nudist after hours!" he proclaimed.

So much has changed!

David Lynch
Lynch Graphics, Inc.
www.lynchgraphics.com

I worked for an Apple Education Dealer and we had a Mac II not sure which version but I remeber it being very expensive even for a demo system, and Photoshop was installed on it. The first thing I learned was the clone tool. I thought that was so cool that I didn't even have to learn anything else for a long time. I really didn't get good at PS until version 3.0 though when I actually went to work for a publishing company.

I remember ruining my first "original" file by typing in text without first changing the name of the file. Once you hit that enter key, that was it: permanent text. No image underneath, no fixing a typo. Poof. We had to send the slide back out to be rescanned. Boy did I ever learn a lesson.

Had to make documents so small because there was no memory--never more than 72 dpi,
Then it just kept getting bigger and better! I uswze it all the time in my photography business.

First encountered it just as it was changing from Barneyscan to Photoshop - there was a beloved local Mac store (no, not ComputerWare) called MacAdam, from which I got a (no doubt unauthorized) floppy - no installer, you just copied the app, as I recall. I was shooting hardware for Macworld at the time, and we always needed a scan to show on the screens of those 100-pound-plus monitors. A little color enhancement in PS - and it's most important feature for us at the time, if you hit the spacebar the cursor disappeared (gosh, I hope I'm remembering this correctly!) -so we could "burn in" that beautiful monitor image onto the film (remember that stuff?).
My first digital print project on my Mac IIci required that I split the RGB image into channels, to run the filter on each separately, then re-combine into RGB - hey, what you had to do when RAM came in 1-, 4-, and insanely costly 16-MB SIMMs!
Now I have to save my pennies to replace my Dual G-5, just to achieve minimum specs to run LightRoom 3...

When I began my associate art degree in 1989, my school had no computers, so our version of Photoshop was acrylic paint!

In my first painting class, the instructor asked us to create a page layout by cutting pictures out of magazines and pasting them onto a 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper. The day we turned them in, he said, "Ok. Paint it." It took me 4 weeks to illustrate my Australian page layout - parrots, kangaroos, a koala, Sydney and the Great Barrier Reef.

By the time I finished in 1991, they bought this contraption called an Apple with a screen that was six or eight inches wide. That painting instructor was amazed that it could display 16.5 million colors. There was only one, so I never got to use it...just see it.

In 1998, at the age of 29, I went back to the same school to complete my bachelors degree. It was then I was introduced to Photoshop - I believe it was 4.0. The whole room was filled with those Apple contraptions, but they had much bigger screens. I had to ask an 18-year old class mate how to turn it on.

Worked at an engineering firm doing graphic design in 1996 and my co-worker and I would "study" Photoshop 3.0 together when we had down time. I was struck by the use of photography lingo -- masking, burn, dodge, etc. Used real work projects to learn the program. Then started using it in my fine arts. Still do both graphic design and fine art with it. Loved it then, love it now.

Adobe P/shop 4.0...

Have to admit though it was a $20 pirate copy from Bali because there was no way I could have afforded the $1400 cost at the time...

Gone legit since then of course...

I colour stuff...

I do not know any versions before I started using it. But I'm 23 and I've been working with Photoshop since 5.0. That's all I know.