If you need to modify a photo, there is a good chance that you will photoshop it. But even though people have been taking photos for 30 years from today, it wasn’t until the last decade that it became widely accepted that “photoshop” can be used as a verb. Before that, I was more likely to “edit an image with Photoshop” than to “photoshop an image.”
The rise of photoshop, the verb, follows our cultural concerns about image manipulation. While the term was adopted among internet commentators only years after the software’s release on February 19, 1990, it didn’t become mainstream until stories about edited blurb and retouched celebrities began to regularly fill our news nearly two decades later.
There were many cheaper editing apps – Photoshop didn’t have to become the go-to word
It was not inevitable that Photoshop became the term of reference for image manipulation. 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 in the early days of computers. On top of that, Photoshop was largely inaccessible professional software – difficult to use and really expensive. It originally sold for $ 895, and it never got much cheaper.
Despite these obstacles, Photoshop became the household name for image editing. In part that’s because it quickly became the industry standard for designers. But it also quickly became the tool used for sillier creations and online pranks, leading to many of its early informal uses.
Blogs and tech publications were among the first to start referring to Photoshop in a more colloquial way. Cabling wrote that someone had “Photoshopped Scenarios” in an October 1999 article. Something horrible seems to have first used “Photoshopping” in November 2001 while writing about covering its founder’s face with digital pimples. In the next years, Boing boing mentioned twisted “Photoshopping” versions of children’s books, and Engadget refers to having “Photoshopped” an image to display on PlayStation Portable.
Piracy soared, and so did concerns about retouched images
The first uses of the term among the mainstream publications were a bit more awkward. In 2006, The New York Times wrote about a model whose body was “apparently Adobe Photoshopped”, while The Wall Street Journal he used the term metaphorically (“you’ve thought about it in Photoshop”) to refer to a person who had reconsidered their view of a photo.
It was also around this time that Photoshop became much more accessible, though not by Adobe’s choice. Peer-to-peer piracy services such as Napster have been around since the turn of the century, but it was in the mid-2000s that software piracy became much more widespread. The adoption of broadband Internet increased at the beginning of the decade and, combined with BitTorrent, it became much easier to download and distribute pirated copies of large applications and games. While the details about widespread Photoshop piracy are largely anecdotal, a 2009 report by a group of software makers, including Adobe, estimated that more than 40 percent of PC software was pirated.
The use of the term really started to grow as concerns about retouched images became mainstream. In 2007, Gawker began writing about images of celebrities that had been Photoshopped, such as a supposedly lewd image of Paris Hilton. In 2008, TMZ reported on a L’Oréal image with a “severely Photoshopped Beyonce.” That same year, The New York Times wrote about how Iran’s state media appeared to have tweaked an image of a missile test to add a fourth missile when only three had been launched, and The Telegraph covered a controversy over whether a Dove ad campaign intended to feature “real beauty” instead of retouched models had been retouched.
“The verb is too efficient a way of referring to action.”
The big change came during those years when big publications started using Photoshop without frills, as in “I’m going to Photoshop this image.” TMZ called readers to “Photoshop some scandalous threesome photos” of some celebrities in March 2007. The term appeared on The New York Times a month later and Gawker One year after that.
Seeing an increase in usage in those years, Merriam-Webster decided to add “photoshop” to her dictionary in 2008. “As it gained more usage, it was clearly going nowhere,” Emily Brewster, Senior Editor at Merriam-Webster, said The edge. “The verb is too efficient a way of referring to action.”
Brewster says that kind of linguistic efficiency, for example, “I tweaked it” versus “I altered the image with digital software,” is often why a noun transforms into a verb. “Especially when a noun refers to a process or a way of doing something, it really lends itself to transformation into a verb,” Brewster said.
These examples of news websites were not the first uses of photoshop as a verb. Merriam-Webster’s first cataloged use of photoshop comes from a Usenet newsgroup in 1992. And if you look through old forums and news website archives, you will find instances of photoshop, photoshop, and photoshopping comment sections long before you. I will find them in real articles.
As Kendrick says in his Pulitzer Prize-winning album, “I’m so sick and tired of Photoshop.”
Part of the reason is that traditional publications are often hesitant to use colloquial language until it is generally understood by readers. That generally means that once a word like Photoshop is printed in a major publication, a certain degree of widespread use is reached, enough that editors believe it will be clear to most readers.
This is also the type of formally approved usage that Merriam-Webster looks for when determining whether to add a new word. “That tells us that you have reached this level of use, which means that native speakers are likely to find the word in print, and the word will stick,” said Brewster. And that means that if readers don’t know what it means, it will be in the dictionary for them to look up.
In a lovely coincidence The edgeThe copy desk made several updates to our site’s style guide yesterday. Among them was the guide that we can now “lower case proper nouns as verbs”, which means that, after nine years on the Internet, the writers of The edge I can finally tell you to google something or photoshop an image.
“I believe that the users of a language, the people, should be standards guides, not brands or companies “, Kara Verlaney, The edgeThe senior copy editor told me. Continuing to capitalize on photoshop “just stopped making sense” when these words are already used so colloquially, he said. “I didn’t decide (to change it). It was already happening.”
Adobe isn’t excited about any of this
In recent years, the word photoshop has also had its meaning divorced from the application itself, it has become shorthand for lying in general. In “Humble,” Kendrick Lamar raps “I’m so fucking sick and tired of Photoshop” and begs to see something natural. Jay-Z discusses perceptions of his marriage in a song by All is love with the phrase “There is no photoshop, only real life”. Photo editing is not the point; it is about the general manipulation of reality.
As this type of transformation occurs, the companies behind these proper names are often resistant to being used colloquially and generically. If a word becomes a generic term, companies run the risk of losing their trademark, as happened with Escalator, which was originally an escalator brand. (The term became so generic that it even morphed into the word “climb,” according to Merriam-Webster.)
Photoshop is also a trademark term, and Adobe has been hesitant to accept the word’s success due to concerns about losing its rights. Today, the company seems to avoid telling people not to use it, even if it doesn’t endorse the verb itself. In an email to The edge, Adobe said, “We are very proud of the Photoshop brand, its place in culture and the role it continues to play in fostering Creativity for All.”
But in the past, Adobe has been more blunt in telling people not to use the app’s name as a verb. As early as 2004, the company issued a memo that people should say: “The image was modified with Adobe® Photoshop® software.”
Unfortunately, that’s not nearly as catchy as saying a photo was purchased.
