So early? Man, my memory is ‘really’ failing me…
Thanks.
When you think back, you realise that the most important upgrade was photoshop 3 to 4. Some of the most essential things were introduced then : Actions and non-destuctive editing.
A lot of things since then have just been to make things EASIER to use rather than introducing new functionality – Indeed with actions, brought about as beautifully well as they were from the outset (compare them with their half hearted implementation in Illustrator), it was possible back then to do many things that people mistakenly think are new.
look at that page and see how it’s gone from a description of important new features in each release to marketing speak as the versions get later?
Ah, but they’re still coming. Non-destructive is the new paradigm, and that happened in CS/2/3 with ACR and smart objects.
In fact, I suspect ACR _is_ the new Photoshop, slowly getting fatter and fatter inside the womb…next will be selection tools and layers in ACR, just wait.
i’m not saying that each release didn’t have something good, but notice how as they go on, they go from one or two of the features that really made the program to things like:
# Mobile device graphic optimization
# Improvements to cloning and healing
# Faster launching
dear lord, someone put the marketing geeks back in the cage. faster launching did they say? tell that to people with network printers.
I agree, high bit depth and ACR, along with warp/liquify and Smart Objects all deserve a place in the pantheon of serious developments. But they all pale into insignificance compared to actions and adjustment layers.
In Photoshop 4 you could set up action that would render text and vectors on large scale documents and automatically sesize them to the target use displacement maps with actions to quickly tweak alpha channels to create subtle distortions, in those days replacing liquify and warp customize actions do almost anything available with layer styles etc.
All with the power afforded by actions. A LOT of window dressing since then – how many interface "enhancements" have we had?
And some of them still are!
Lets hope they don’t take the route of Mark Hamburg