This past week, Adobe Photoshop turned 25 years old. That’s right: at an age where us mere mortals are often still embarrassingly reliant on our parents, Photoshop is taking the opportunity to look back on how it became one of the world’s most ubiquitous pieces of software, and how in just a quarter-century it has transformed our very conceptions of beauty and even reality itself.
Of course, to the general public Photoshop is probably best-known for the role it has played in the fashion and advertising industries. Serving up heavily processed, idealized images of anatomically dubious models, its effect in our wider culture is well-known, but Photoshop has had its impact on the architecture profession as well. Join us after the break as we look at 25 years of Photoshop in architecture.
Mirroring the trends in advertising, Photoshop has fueled architecture’s own battle around the concept of “natural beauty.” In the 21st-century world of image-saturated online sharing, the pressure to produce that perfect shot has often led to the removal of blemishes and irregularities from photographs of completed buildings. In some cases, these “irregularities” have even included human beings, who with their relaxed attitude to formal composition and outdated clothes can ruin even the most perfectly designed, timeless buildings.
