50 Fun Facts About Adobe Photoshop

Which film awards gave Photoshop creators Thomas and John Knoll a Scientific and Engineering Award in 2019?

The Oscars honored the brothers for Photoshop's original architecture, design and development. John Knoll had already won an Academy Award for the visual effects in a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel.

Photoshop co-creator John Knoll worked at which visual effects company, where he supervised the Star Wars prequels?

Industrial Light & Magic employed John Knoll when he urged his brother Thomas to grow a hobby program into a full image editor. He later helped pitch the story that became Rogue One.

Photoshop 1.0 went on sale in February 1990 for which computer platform only, at a list price of $895?

Macintosh owners had Photoshop to themselves at first; Thomas Knoll had written the original code on a Mac Plus. Windows users had to wait for version 2.5.

Which Photoshop tool paints with pixels sampled from elsewhere in the image, a staple for hiding unwanted objects?

Clone Stamp copies from a source point that you set by Alt-clicking (Option-clicking on macOS), then paints those pixels wherever you drag, even into another open document.

A Photoshop layer mask is a grayscale image; painting it with which color hides that part of the layer?

Black conceals and white reveals, while shades of gray leave the layer partly see-through. Because a mask only hides pixels, the original picture stays intact underneath.

What nickname do designers give the animated dashed outline that Photoshop draws around a selected area?

Marching ants were first widely seen in Bill Atkinson's MacPaint in the 1980s. The moving border was later adopted by Photoshop and many other graphics programs.

Photoshop's Type menu has a command that pastes which famous placeholder text, used by designers to mock up layouts?

Lorem ipsum is scrambled Latin taken from a work by Cicero. Because nobody can read it, viewers judge the layout and the typeface rather than the words.

Which Adobe subscription service became the only way to get new versions of Photoshop from 2013 onward?

Creative Cloud swapped boxed software for a recurring fee. Photoshop CS6, released a year earlier, was the last version sold with a perpetual license.

Which Photoshop tool, named after a darkroom trick of holding back light from a print, lightens the areas you paint?

Dodge takes its name from film printing, where shading part of the paper under the enlarger kept that area pale. Its partner tool does the reverse and darkens.

Which file extension does Photoshop give its native documents, which keep layers, masks and text editable?

The .PSD extension stands for Photoshop Document. Rival editors such as Affinity Photo can open the format too, because so many designers trade files in it.

Which Photoshop selection tool grabs an area of similar color in one click, guided by a Tolerance setting?

Magic Wand selects pixels close in color to the one you click, so a red flower can be isolated without tracing its outline. A higher Tolerance takes in a wider range of shades.

Which Photoshop tool draws a freehand selection border and also comes in Polygonal and Magnetic versions?

Lasso selections follow wherever you drag. The Magnetic version snaps its border to edges in the picture, which helps with objects set against a contrasting backdrop.

Which Photoshop tool picks up a color from the image so that you can paint with exactly that shade?

Eyedropper sampling is not limited to the open picture: keep the mouse button down and you can drag to pick a color from anywhere else on the screen.

Which Photoshop tool trims the edges of a picture and can also straighten a tilted horizon in one step?

Crop no longer has to throw anything away: the trimmed pixels can be kept out of sight, so you can reopen the tool later and bring back what you cut.

Holding which key in Photoshop temporarily switches to the Hand tool, so you can drag around a zoomed-in image?

Spacebar turns almost any tool into the Hand tool for as long as you hold it. Double-clicking the Hand tool's icon fits the whole image in the window.

Which Photoshop command, on Ctrl+T or Command+T, lets you scale, rotate and skew a layer in one operation?

Free Transform saves quality as well as time: a pixel image gets slightly less sharp each time a transformation is committed, so doing every change in one pass is kinder to it.

Which pair of keys shrinks and enlarges the brush tip in Photoshop without opening a single panel?

Square brackets resize the brush: [ makes the tip smaller and ] makes it larger. Add Shift and the same keys become curly braces, which soften or harden its edge.

In Photoshop's toolbar, what does a small triangle at the lower right of an icon signal?

Hidden tools sit beneath it, and clicking and holding the icon opens the group. Pressing a tool's shortcut letter with Shift steps through the same group without the mouse.

Which strip in Photoshop's workspace changes its controls to suit whichever tool is currently selected?

Options bar space also carries the Home icon, a shortcut back to Photoshop's Home screen from any open document. Everything else on it is context-sensitive.

Which key hides or shows all of Photoshop's panels at once, toolbar included, to clear the screen for the image?

Tab clears every panel in one press, and pressing it again brings them all back. Shift+Tab is the gentler version, hiding the side panels but leaving the toolbar in place.

Which kind of Photoshop layer changes color and tone in the layers below without permanently altering any pixels?

Adjustment layers can be re-edited or thrown away at any time. Painting on the mask that comes with each one limits the change to just part of the picture.

What does Photoshop call a layer that keeps its original image data, so repeated resizing never degrades quality?

Smart Object layers hold the source untouched, so you can scale, rotate, skew or warp as often as you like. They first appeared in Photoshop CS2.

Which Photoshop technique uses the shape of one layer to limit where the layers above it are visible?

Clipping mask groups are easy to spot in the Layers panel: the base layer's name is underlined, and the thumbnails of the layers it clips are indented.

Which Photoshop blending mode always gives a darker result, an effect Adobe likens to drawing with several marking pens?

Multiply leaves a color unchanged wherever the layer above is white, so only that layer's darker areas show through.

Which Photoshop color mode is the usual choice for images in a full-color printed brochure?

CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow and key, the plate that prints outlines and text more crisply than three inks could alone. Images bound for screens stay in RGB.

In Photoshop's Image Size dialog, what does the resolution unit ppi stand for?

Pixels per inch says how tightly an image's dots are packed when it is printed. Adobe suggests at least 220 ppi for a high-quality photo from an inkjet printer.

Photoshop is classed as which kind of graphics editor, because it stores the color of every pixel rather than paths?

Raster images record the exact color of each pixel, which suits photographs. Vector graphics describe shapes with mathematical formulas, the better fit for line art.

Which Photoshop layer setting, running from 0 to 100 percent, controls how see-through the whole layer appears?

Opacity fades everything on the layer, effects included. A separate Fill slider fades only the layer's own pixels, shapes or text and leaves its effects at full strength.

Which Photoshop feature, introduced in CS5, covers a removed object with detail sampled from elsewhere in the picture?

Content-Aware Fill studies the surroundings and builds a matching patch, so a stray tourist or power line can vanish without hand-painting.

Which Photoshop filter lets you push, pull, pucker and bloat any area of an image, and is often used on portraits?

Liquify can even find faces by itself: its face-detecting controls identify the eyes, nose and mouth automatically, so each feature can be adjusted separately.

Jennifer in Paradise, the photo John Knoll used to demo early Photoshop, shows his future wife on which island?

Bora Bora was where John Knoll photographed his girlfriend Jennifer in 1987, and he proposed later the same day. He left copies of the picture, packaged with the software, at the companies he visited.

Photoshop's Generative Fill, which adds or removes objects from a text prompt, launched on which family of AI models?

Firefly is Adobe's own family of generative models, first opened as a public beta in March 2023. Generative Fill reached the full Photoshop release that September.

Which free, open-source Photoshop alternative began in 1995 as a student project at UC Berkeley?

GIMP got its name when its two student authors added a G to '-IMP', inspired by a character in the film Pulp Fiction. Today it stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program.

Which Adobe program, on sale three years before Photoshop, builds artwork from vector paths rather than pixels?

Illustrator was Adobe's second product, after the PostScript language. Designers reach for it for logos and typesetting work, and for Photoshop when the job is a photograph.

Which Adobe app for photographers catalogs shoots and saves edits as instructions, leaving originals untouched?

Lightroom takes its name from the darkroom, where film was once developed. It grew out of an experiment that a veteran Photoshop engineer began in 2002.

Which hobbyist edition of Photoshop, introduced alongside version 6, keeps most pro features but simplifies them?

Elements took over from Photoshop LE, an earlier 'Limited Edition' aimed at novices. It organizes and shares photos as well as editing them.

Which free Adobe plug-in lets Photoshop read the sensor data that DSLRs save instead of finished JPEGs?

Camera Raw has Photoshop's original author behind it: Thomas Knoll went on to work on the plug-in, which translates the differing raw formats of each camera maker.

Which Photoshop command starts as a straight diagonal line on a graph, reshaped by adding control points?

Curves lets you adjust points anywhere in the tonal range, so the shadows can be lifted while the highlights stay exactly where they are.

What is the name of the Photoshop graph that plots how many pixels an image has at each brightness level?

Histogram graphs put the dark tones at the left and the light tones at the right, so one glance shows whether a photo leans toward shadow or highlight.

Which Photoshop mode turns a selection into a temporary colored overlay that you can refine with any painting tool?

Quick Mask overlays can even be modified with a filter. Press Q to leave the mode and the overlay turns back into an ordinary selection.

What did Thomas Knoll first call the 1987 grayscale-image program that grew into Photoshop, before trying ImagePro?

Display did only one job at first: showing grayscale pictures on a monochrome screen. The ImagePro name turned out to be taken, so Photoshop was the third try.

Which scanner maker shipped the very first copies of Photoshop, about 200 of them, bundled with its slide scanner?

Barneyscan sold the program as Barneyscan XP in 1989, a year before Adobe's own release. Adobe bought its license that April, urged on by its art director, Russell Brown.

What does Photoshop call a small application that runs a recorded action on any files dragged onto its icon?

Droplet files can sit on the desktop like any other program. Drag a whole folder of images onto one and Photoshop processes every picture inside it.

Which brand of hand-cut masking film lends its name to the overlay Photoshop uses to show a layer mask?

Rubylith is a translucent red film on a clear backing, cut and peeled away to make masks for printing plates. Photoshop borrows the word for viewing a mask as a tinted overlay.

Which command in Photoshop's Select menu swaps a selection so that every previously unselected area becomes selected?

Inverse is easy to confuse with Invert, a separate command that flips an image's colors into a negative. A common trick is to select a plain backdrop, then swap to get the subject.

Which letter key, pressed with Ctrl or Command, copies the current Photoshop layer or selection onto a new layer?

J is the one to remember: Ctrl+J (Command+J on macOS) is Photoshop's 'New layer via copy'. Add Shift and the selection is cut out of the original layer instead.

Which single key swaps Photoshop's foreground and background colors, handy when painting on a mask?

X flips the two color swatches at the foot of the toolbar. A second key, D, resets the pair to their defaults.

Which Photoshop filter sharpens a picture despite its name, which comes from a blurred negative used in darkrooms?

Unsharp Mask began in film printing, where a blurred copy of a negative served as a mask to boost edge contrast. Photoshop's filter draws a lighter and a darker line along each edge.

What does Photoshop call the drive it uses for temporary storage when a document will not fit in RAM?

Scratch disk space defaults to the drive that holds the operating system. When it runs out of room, Photoshop reports an error and cannot finish the task in hand.

In Photoshop, which kind of channel stores a saved selection as a grayscale mask alongside the color channels?

Alpha takes its name from the Greek letter in a blending formula, as Alvy Ray Smith, who helped introduce the idea in the late 1970s, has explained.