ALUMNI NEWS
Family Ties Inspire Alumnus to Develop the World's Most Popular Photo Software
Three million graphic designers think the world of Thomas Knoll-and they've never even met him. Knoll, an Engineering Physics graduate from the Class of 1982, is the developer of Adobe Photoshop-a computer program that has become the de facto standard for digital image enhancement, photo retouching, and image compositing.
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| Thomas Knoll (BSEP '82, MSE '84) (left) with brother John Knoll |
Feature for feature, no other program comes close to doing what Photoshop can, which is why designers swear by it. As one Ann Arbor art director said, "I use it on every photo I touch." How did an engineer, whose computer skills were mostly self-taught, come to create such a critical tool for the design industry? Knoll credits his family with much of his inspiration.
His father, Glenn-a professor in the College of Engineering's Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences department and a former Interim Dean of the College-maintained a photographic darkroom in the family's basement.
"Photography was a hobby of mine in high school," explained Knoll. "In Dad's darkroom, I learned how to make black-and-white and color prints, how to balance color and contrast."
After graduating from Ann Arbor's Huron High School and earning a B.S. at U-M, Knoll decided to stay on at the University and work toward a Ph.D.
In graduate school, Knoll focused his attention on the study of computer vision ("the processing of digital images"), then a subdiscipline of computer information and control engineering. In late 1987, he purchased an Apple Macintosh Plus to help him with his studies. Discovering that he couldn't display any gray-scale levels in his images, he wrote a subroutine to simulate that effect.
At the same time, a continent away, Knoll's brother John was busy teaching himself the art (and science) of computer rendering. John was employed at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) in Marin County, California, and was searching for ways to make his job in movie visual effects easier.
"He used my program to display images," said Knoll. "Later, when the Macintosh II came out, I added support for displaying color images as well."
John made suggestions to expand and refine the program and began to use it in his work; the underwater adventure movie The Abyss (1989) was the first featuring this innovative technology.
At the same time the brothers were collaborating, Thomas Knoll was trying to finish his graduate work.
"My fellowship money had run out and my wife was expecting our first child," he explained. "I was feeling pressure to finish what I was doing and find a job."
In early 1988, Knoll decided to give himself six more months to finish a beta (test) version of the software and offer it up for sale. His brother contributed by showing it around to software publishers in California's Silicon Valley.
The beta version met with enthusiastic response and generated several offers; the best came from Adobe Systems Incorporated.
"Our program fit well with their 'Illustrator' product," said Knoll.
A handshake agreement in September turned into a formal contract the following April. An advance on future earnings enabled Knoll to support his family while polishing the program for launch.
In mid-February of 1990, the first commercial version of Photoshop (a name suggested by another software publisher) entered the marketplace. By the end of the month, the program had already made enough money to cover Knoll's advance, and sales continued to rise.
Though John Knoll continued to use Photoshop in his work on dozens of special effects-driven movies and promoted its acceptance throughout ILM, the software made even greater inroads in the graphic design industry. There, it cornered the market on the high end, with 3,000,000 copies sold worldwide.
"Several competitors have come and gone over the years, but none have approached Photoshop in popularity and utility," noted Knoll. One reason may be his unswerving commitment to continuously improve the program.
Though Adobe employs 15 to 20 developers on Photoshop's development team, Knoll still makes significant changes in the code from his home office in Ann Arbor.
"I work on a Macintosh 9500 with a G3 accelerator card," he explained, "and I'm networked to Adobe headquarters. We conduct a lot of business by e-mail."
He also visits work sites with concentrations of Photoshop licenses-for example, Hallmark Cards-and eagerly absorbs the results of Photoshop user surveys.
Though Knoll's contract with Adobe has left him in a very comfortable financial position, he works as hard at updating the software as anyone.
"For the seven months before the last version (5.0) came out, I worked 60- hour weeks. Over the course of a year, I average about a 40-hour work week."
It's hard work, improving a product that's already the best there is, but Thomas Knoll keeps on trying. His words of wisdom for anyone considering a career in the field of software development?
"Make a good product that you enjoy. Get good feedback. Find a good publisher with established marketing and distribution channels. Then concentrate on making your product even better." Adobe and Photoshop are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated. Apple, Macintosh Plus, Macintosh II, and Macintosh 9500 are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.