Photoshop was developed in 1987 by the American brothers Thomas and John Knoll, who sold the distribution license to Adobe Systems Incorporated in 1988. Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display.Photoshop was created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Systems for macOS and Windows.