Thomas knoll biography

Photoshop is arguably one of the most influential technologies to ever be created. The name is even used when referencing any kind of CGI, even if the software is mostly for flat imagery. Its use is iconic when it comes to magazines, film productions, and social media. This project was started by Thomas Knoll as a series of subroutines meant to render images on a screen.

As he continued to progress development, his brother noticed the potential of the software to expand purposes. The options were much like what he had witnessed with the software used by Pixar. Display became ImagePro and John started to promote the software through public demos. Eventually, it was renamed Photoshop and the license to distribute was signed to Adobe.

Years later, Adobe purchased the full rights to Photoshop. Thomas Knoll remains a software engineer with Adobe continually working on features for his project. This file type is meant to be an industry standard for digital cameras that require a RAW data format to process and save raw image captures. Thomas is married and has two children with Ruth Knoll.

He met Ruth while attending the University of Michigan. She also founded a K-5 school named Summers-Knoll for the bright, creative, and gifted. Ruth Knoll currently sits as the President of the Clinton Arts Center of which she is also a founder. Both Thomas and John Knoll were awarded an Oscar for their software program that changed the world.

The brothers accepted in person. As the only personal achievement award given to the brothers for their creation, it did come a bit later than deserved. Thomas has continued his work in programming and keeping up with Photoshop to this day. He was also a technology aficionado intrigued by the emergence of the personal computer. Even though Thomas loved hands-on darkroom work and developed film and made prints, he too had a keen interest in computers and programming.

Thomas knoll biography

In he purchased an Apple Macintosh Plus, to help him with his Ph. To solve that problem, Thomas wrote some command line utilities that did various imaging processing steps e. When Thomas demonstrated his image-processing tools to his younger brother John, who was on vacation in Ann Arbor, he embraced the idea. ILM was the visual effects arm of the famous film production company Lucasfilm, and John was experimenting with computers to create special effects.

Thus the pair began to collaborate on a larger, more cohesive application, which they dubbed Display. At the end of John arranged to purchase a new Macintosh II, the first color-capable model of the series, which cost almost USD. At the same time, Thomas rewrote the code for Display to work in color. Thomas developed also the unique capability to create soft-edged selections that would allow local changes and also developed such features as Levels for adjusting tonality, Color Balance, Hue, and Saturation for adjusting the color, and painting capabilities.

In the beginning of however, the project was closed to be cancelled. Thomas was feeling pressure to finish what he was doing and find a permanent job. Fortunately, he decided to give himself six more months to finish a beta version and let John shop it around Silicon Valley. But with his naive optimism, John convinced Thomas it would be worth the effort.

Well, John was right, but so was Thomas. It did take a lot of work, but they will make a lot of money. The brothers decided to choose a more appropriate name for the product. The initial name— Display , was not appropriate anymore, because the program got more powerful, so they needed a name that would reflect what it did. The next working names were Image Pro and then Photo Lab even PhotoHut was considered , but each of those was shot down in turn by similar products in that market space.

Then, during a program demo to some company, Thomas confided to someone that he was having problems naming the program. When John started shopping around for a company to invest in Photoshop, traveling all over Silicon Valley, he gave program demos to a number of companies, including a company named Adobe Systems. This will become a lucky strike.

At his time Thomas remained in Ann Arbor, Michigan, fine-tuning the program, while John John kept pushing his brother to add new features, he even wrote a simple manual to make the program more understandable. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. American software engineer.

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