The Photoshop Healing Brush.(Adobe Systems Inc.'s innovation in image processing software)

I travel around the world talking with Photoshop users, and one question that users repeatedly ask me is, "How do you keep coming up with new features?" While we've come a long way over the years, there has never been more we can do to enable Photoshop to solve new imaging problems than there is today. After all, multiple domains are converging: image

processing and computer vision, 2D and 3D, and still and video imaging. And as a result, there is amazing research happening at Adobe and all around the world that feeds features that push boundaries.

Innovation comes from everywhere, if you recognize it and if you are ready to take advantage of it. Take the example of the Photoshop Healing Brush, an overnight success that took years to develop. The Healing Brush gives users the ability to correct imperfections, causing the flaws to disappear into the surrounding image. It matches the texture, lighting, transparency, and shading of sampled pixels to the pixels being healed. As a result, the repaired pixels blend seamlessly into the rest of the image.

The inspiration for the Healing Brush came from something you might hear in a Physics 101 lecture: When you place a piece of metal on a heated surface, heat diffuses through the metal until it reaches a steady state. But what does heat diffusion have to do with pixel restoration? More than you might think.

A Culture of Innovation

Adobe Photoshop, first released in 1990, was ahead of its time. It was conceived as a program to display grayscale images when our development machines had only black-and-white bitmap monitors. Over the past 16 years, it has evolved to become the industry standard for image editing, delivering a long sequence of innovation firsts to the desktop world and enabling creative professionals and scientists alike to do things they never thought possible.

In the early days of Photoshop, innovation was the product of caffeine and sleep deprivation. As my colleague Marc Pawliger, senior director of engineering, explains it, all-nighters used to be a badge of honor. These days, we strive for a better balance between work and life, and innovation comes from less-caffeinated sources.