Discover Industrial Light & Magic’s role in helping inspire one of the world’s most iconic pieces of imaging software.
ILM executive creative director John Knoll and his brother Thomas recently joined Adobe’s Russell Preston Brown for a live recording of The Photoshop Archives at Lucasfilm’s San Francisco headquarters. Together, they discussed the origins of Adobe Photoshop, first created by the Knoll brothers in 1987 and acquired by Adobe the following year.
John Knoll had been hired at ILM in 1986 and soon began working the night shift as a motion-control camera operator. He also pursued an interest in computer graphics, then a rapidly expanding field quickly gaining traction in the realms of filmmaking and visual effects. Not long after he started at ILM, Knoll toured the ILM CG Department. The team had only recently been formed after the spin-off of the Lucasfilm Computer Division’s graphics group as “Pixar, Inc.” had left a vacuum for active work in the field within the company. The ILM team retained a fabled Pixar Image Computer, a groundbreaking image processor that had already been used to create a memorable stained glass knight in the ILM production, Young Sherlock Holmes (1985).
Knoll’s exposure to the Pixar machine yielded a glimpse of the future for visual effects, as he explains in The Photoshop Archives, and he quickly set about finding the means to create similar tools that could be adapted on more accessible computers available to the average consumer. He soon recruited his brother, Thomas, already an experienced computer programmer and scientist, to partner with him in the venture. Working on their own time while John continued in his role at ILM, the roots of Photoshop had been planted.
Soon after its debut, Photoshop was employed by ILM artists on James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989), which featured the all-computer graphics pseudopod creature. The software would continue to play an important role in helping the ILM team to innovate CG characters and worlds for many years to come.
Don’t miss the full episode featuring the discussion with John and Thomas Knoll on The Photoshop Archives.
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