This is how terrible Photoshop 2.5 was 30 years ago
Mar 2, 2022
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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Photoshop has been around for over 30 years, and some of you may have used it from its very beginning. Colin Smith of Video Revealed used it for photo retouching back in the mid-1990s and he reflects on Photoshop 2.5 that he used back then.
In this video, Colin looks back on some of his projects and the difficulties he faced working in an early version of Photoshop. There were no layers, he only had one undo… And these were only some of the challenges he faced.
Photoshop 2.5 was introduced way back in 1992. Not only does it celebrate its 30th birthday today, it’s also special because it was the first Photoshop version available for Macintosh and Windows.
Now, before I go any further, it’s worth noting that early Photoshop was certainly groundbreaking and useful for the age it was made in. But when we look at it from 2022, it really lacks some functionalities that we may even take for granted today. For example, I can’t imagine not working with layers nowadays. Not to mention having only one shot at undoing what I did. I make so many mistakes that I even wish for an “undo” button in real life.
Another challenge, other than Photoshop itself, was the lack of information. Today we have a bunch of books and tutorials that help us learn and master new techniques. Back then, being self-taught literally meant figuring out most of the stuff on your own, Colin recalls.
The video is rather long, but it’s pretty interesting to watch. Colin goes through some of his earlier projects, sharing some background stories and everything it took him to create a certain image. Watching this makes me grateful for the technology we have today – and I think I’ll never take that “undo” button for granted again!
[How I made a living using Photoshop 2.5 with no layers and 1 undo via FStoppers]
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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8 responses to “This is how terrible Photoshop 2.5 was 30 years ago”
Photoshop 2.5 wasn’t “Photoshop”. It was the cheap, home version not for professionals. They used “2,5” instead of “lite”. It was massively stripped down.
Professional versions are whole numbers.
This is not “Photoshop”. You should edit the story to let people know you are comparing “Wordpad” to “MS Word”.
Sure you don’t want to factcheck yourself before someone else does here? “Paths, CMYK color (2.0), 16-bits-per-channel support, availability on Microsoft Windows (2.5)” – 16bit support is soooooo home version.
Where’s that laugh reaction when you need it?
Suggest you do a little reading. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Photoshop
say woot?? What was i working in then, what that same name… strange
Ah, no.
2.5 was my first version, learnt how to “paste into” save marquees and a lot of workaounds, got a decent frip of it when 3.0 came around with LAYERS – omg that was a revolution.. imagine one has worked in photoshop nearly 30 years.. started out to se what one could do digitally compared to my dark room. Used a mamiya 645 these days, and had a hard time to scan my positives or negatives to be able to work with them..
30 years ago was state of the art…30 years ago. Next.
Seriously??? W/o 2.5 we would not be where we are today!!! Not to mention there wasn’t even a computer that could quite handle the demand of that amazing little program. I used to start a filter and go out for lunch while waiting for it to complete.