As I write articles on many aspects of modern working life, I have made observations as to how certain technological advancements have caused decline, even extinction, to existing products as the great technological evolutionary process continues and the weakest go to the wall. Among these have been the demise of the typewriter, which was all but wiped out by the more user-friendly word processor, and the vast thinning down of the telephone directory caused by the rise of the mobile phone.

You could add to this list those who provide photograph development services, who have seen their custom wither away to a fraction of what it was at the hands of digital photography. This is hardly surprising as the benefits of digital snaps are so great that popping the film in at the chemist's is a rarely-seen occurrence today.

For example, with digital photos you are in complete control of which images you keep and which you discard. Under the development system you paid for every single photo, even the rubbish ones (and a set of photos I have that were taken by my ex-wife in Budapest is a perfect illustration of this).

So the old system of recording images that has been with us since mid-Victorian times has been under threat from its digital rival for some time now. It was inevitable, therefore, that a product would be developed that would allow the user to manipulate digital images on screen. That product was Photoshop.

Although that is not strictly true as the application we all know and love today originally started life under the rather uninspiring name of Display, and it had a further name change in 1988, when it became known as Image Pro. There has been one further slight change as when it first became known under its current name it appeared as PhotoShop, although the latter capital was ditched somewhere along the way.

So who gets the credit for it?

The creators of what we now know as Photoshop are brothers John and Tom Knoll, who hail from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Back in the late eighties John was working in image processing at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the visual effects company that was founded by George Lucas, while brother Tom was studying for his PhD in image processing at the University of Michigan. As they experimented at home on a very early Macintosh, John realised that some of Tom's work was similar to that he worked with himself in a professional capacity on the Pixar, a customised computer used by ILM. This was the spark that led to the brothers working together on that first application, Display.

By 1988 Display had not set the world of graphics alight but market research revealed that there was very little competition out there for their product. Spurred on by this the brothers developed a full commercial application and Image Pro was born. It was way ahead of anything else on the market at that time.

As is often the case when historic moments occur but their significance is not recognised at the time, no-one seems to know exactly where the name Photoshop came from. What we do know is that, having initially been turned down by Adobe, the brothers struck a deal with a company called Barneyscan, who included their application as part of the bundle it provided with its scanners. This short-lived venture saw yet another name change as for the duration the application was called Barneyscan XP.

After their brief stint with Barneyscan, John returned to Adobe to try and rekindle interest in the application and it proved to be a huge turning point. The then Art Director at Adobe, Russell Brown was suitably impressed by what he saw. So much so, in fact, that he persuaded Adobe to take a chance on it.

And that was that. Adobe Photoshop was born and it opened up a whole new world where amateurs and professionals alike could manipulate, enhance, repair and apply all kinds of effects to photographs. And while some competitors have appeared on the scene, they have done little to stem the march of the mighty Photoshop, one of the few applications, if not the only one, to be listed in the dictionary as a verb.

But I can't help wondering, after all of that effort, all of the sheer hard work and the setbacks and disappointments along the way, how the brothers would feel if they were to see the product of their labour used to paste a the head of a footballer onto the body of a donkey, which appears to be one of its main uses in online football forums.

In all seriousness though a good 'photoshopper' is a marvel to watch (I have worked with a few) and this vast application is a challenging, but certainly worthwhile application in which to seek training. There are samples of excellent Photoshop work done in time lapse on You Tube, in which, for example, an overweight woman is transformed into a slim model. Watching such expertise may cause you to ask if seeing really is believing.