The Guardian about the first ever photoshopped image

The first image edited with Photoshop was a picture from John Knoll’s personal collection. Knoll is creator of visual effects known for his work in movies “Mission Impossible”, “Star Wars” and “Pirates Of The Caribbean”. The subject is his wife Jennifer, topless on the beach in Bora Bora, according to The Guardian.

Pixar Image Computer, one of the first that could be used to manipulate images, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and required special training. John’s brother Thomas, who then was working on a Ph.D. in computer vision at the University of Michigan, had started developing similar image manipulation software that could run on a Macintosh Plus — Photoshop. Its first version came out in January of 1988. The image “Jennifer in Paradise”, that John took in 1987, was used to demo Photoshop’s capabilities.

The Guardian quotes Knoll’s recollection of the experience: “I thought it was amazing. The fact that you could take an image from a film, scan it in and turn it into digits and then manipulate those numbers and put it back out onto a piece of film — it meant that there was literally no limit to what you could do to it in the middle”.