Something Awful appears to have first used “Photoshopping” in November 2001 while writing about covering its founder’s face with digital pimples. Wired wrote that someone had “Photoshopped set designs” in an article from October 1999. But it also quickly became picked up as the tool used for goofier creations and online jokes, too, leading to many of its first informal uses.īlogs and tech publications were among the first to start referring to Photoshop more colloquially. In part, that’s because it quickly became the industry standard for designers. It was very much in spite of these hurdles that photoshop became the known term for image editing. It originally sold for $895, and it never got much cheaper. On top of that, Photoshop was largely inaccessible professional software: hard to use and really expensive. Photographers had been manipulating photos for more than a century before Photoshop was created, and it wasn’t the only piece of image editing software around in the early days of computers. It wasn’t inevitable that photoshop would become the go-to term for image manipulation. There were plenty of cheaper editing apps - photoshop didn’t have to become the go-to word
