Finding Seetharaman Narayanan
Adobe Photoshop! No other software should have changed the industries like Photoshop did. And there is not a single industry that not directly or indirectly linked with a Photoshop result! It’s one of the costlier and most used professional application in the world. Even with a whooping price tag of 799$ Photoshop don’t have a single competitor anywhere near them!
I’ve started using Photoshop (Ps) from release 5.5. I was a student of digital media then. Later I passed the ‘Adobe certified Expert’ exam. Now 7 years later, I consider myself as someone who has a proficiency level somewhere near advanced level on Ps, it has turned into a full blown application that have its hands on almost every field, from movies to medicine and sports to space.
The birth of this blog post is pretty wired. There is a name that has mesmerized me for years, ‘Seetharaman Narayanan’! An Indian name that is on splash screen of Photoshop! Even from the days I was studying Ps we friends used to talk about this name! Every single time we fires up Photoshop, all we do is keep staring on that name till the application window appears! Who is this guy! Even now! With the CS2 edition…that name is what all I notice on the flamboyant Ps splash screen.
Recently one of those usual Photoshop launches and it was taking a bit more time to launch which is very unlikely, a thought went through my mind! I need to get some details about this name. Back home later that day I started googling for ‘Seetharam Narayanan’. The results were unbelievable! I wasn’t alone in the “world”! There are thousands of other PS users who get mesmerized by that name and some of them, mostly Ps addicts has started a fans club for his name. The birth of such a fanclub was really fun! Photocafe is one of the oldest and most visited Photoshop forums in the web! In mid 2000 someone started a thread about the way he gets his eyes stuck on that name when he launches Ps. The first reply was someone calling ‘spam alert’, but for the next few weeks 100’s of users replied “me too”, over 6 pages! It was a phenomenon! It’s that name the majority of the people keep looking at! Later some of them (addicts) joined and started the club!
While going through the thread which is already 7 years old, and also posting my “me too”, I found many comments that’s related to different Ps releases. And that made me want to know the history of Photoshop! I couldn’t find any good articles, interviews or any resource that gave me a detailed description of Ps’s development which was reliable. I decided to give up the effort! As a last try I tried searching in old online magazines! Yes! Got one! An exclusive interview with the fathers of Photoshop! The story of Ps since 1987! The interview was done by one renowned Ps user, who is a beta tester for Ps and a one who gives some ‘feature input’ for Ps developers, Jeff Schewe.
Click HERE to read the entire article on ‘history of Photoshop’. I’d highly recommend this to all Ps enthusiasts and professionals as this changed my outlook towards Photoshop.
Quote from a Seetharaman fan-
” It has been said that Seetharaman Narayanan has evolved to the point where he is more Lens Flare than man. He can bevel and emboss through the power of sheer thought. I heard one time he was walking down the street and some gang tried to mug him and he Unsharp Masked his hand and karate chopped one of the thugs in half, and then one of the other thugs attacked him and he Pinched that guy’s head so hard it exploded and then after he Plastic Wrapped the rest of the thugs he disappeared in a burst of Difference Clouds“
Seetha is responsible for rewriting the core photoshop code from Mac to Windows and making it par with the mac version. He also wrote code for different filters and now works on developing Lightroom and Bridge.
An Interview with Seetha!
When did you become aware of the fascination with your name among Photoshop users?
Jeff Schewe sent me an e-mail sometime in the fall of 2005 about the existence of Seetha’s fanclub thread from ConceptArt.org.
What do you think about it?
I thought it was funny and was amazed at the amount of free time people had at their disposal. I always thought that I was fortunate in getting hired by Adobe at the right time since any Tom, Dick or Harry would have done the same thing I did and perhaps better than what I did. They may not have become famous unless they had some weird last name that is almost un-pronouncable. How long have you been at Adobe? I have been with Adobe for 15 years to date. I joined Adobe as a peon on Photoshop 2.5 on September 23, 1991. Peter Merrill (who now works on Acrobat and is still with Adobe) was the lead engineer on the task of making Photoshop run on Windows 3.1 and I was his deputy in the early days. Peter is one of the brightest engineers I have ever worked with in my 20 year career (he may just be the smartest of all!). I still remember the interview I had with Peter before I got hired at Adobe. Peter had this toy application (that later became Photoshop) with ugly Icons and Cursors he showed me and mentioned to me that he had that code ported over from the Mac and he could even open an image (Flower.psd which by the way, shipped as a sample file with Photoshop 2.5) on Windows. I had previously worked at CrystalGraphics and we had just ported over Crystal’s TOPAS over to the Mac platform just weeks prior to my interview with Adobe and I was totally under whelmed by Peter’s demo of Photoshop on Windows. In spite of my lack of enthusiasm, Peter hired me anyway and the rest is history.
What are you responsible for in Photoshop?
Lots of things. I joined Adobe as an engineer responsible for making the Windows port happen. After laying the foundation for the Windows effort, one of the first things I did for the product was to make it multi-threadable. Those days, Mac did not support multi-threading but Windows NT did. In my spare time, I wrote the multi-threading plug-in that took advantage of multiple processor in Photoshop. Peter was of immense help here. When I was re-writing the image processing algorithms in the plug-ins, he pointed to me that there was no need to do any image processing in the plug-in since the plug-in need not know about algorithms and it would be sufficient to just split the tasks and call the functions that knew how to do image processing. It just shows how stupid I was and how much of a genius that Peter was in pointing me to that simplicity. After we shipped 3.0, the Mac and Windows teams got merged and I worked on several things in the core product. Since the team always viewed me as the Windows guy, it would be interesting to note that I was one of the key persons responsible for the Photoshop port to Mac OS/X.
What is your professional background?
I have a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Regional Engineering College, Tiruchirapalli, India. I came to the U.S to pursue my Masters in Engineering at the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Since that place was so much fun (Playboy’s number one Party School in 1987), I decided to get another Masters from there in Computer Science. I joined CrystalGraphics (I think they are still around) as an engineer on Crystal TOPAS and after a few years at Crystal, I joined Adobe.
Do people express fascination with your name in the real world? Or is this just an on-line phenomenon?
Not really. I had to spell my name a few times before they get it. I got used to it now.
Are there other names on the Splash Screen that you think deserve more credit and get overlooked because people can’t stop staring at your name?
Every one of the engineers and QE deserves as much credit as I do. But I took the cake because of my long name. Too bad Joe Ault, Chris Cox and Scott Byer don’t have the long names as I do.
Are you working on any new projects we can look forward to seeing your name on in the future?
I worked on Bridge 1.0 (I had the opportunity to work on that since I championed the cause for the FileBrowser in Photoshop 7.0 and CS) and am currently working on getting Adobe Lightroom ported to Windows. But Photoshop is always my home.
Everyone knows about your interesting name. What’s one interesting thing about you that people don’t know?
I bike to work every day, rain or shine. My bike route is 20 miles round-trip and I have been riding to work for the past 10 years. I even influenced my mentor Peter Merrill into biking to work. Since Peter is a maniac, he is now doing double-centuries on weekends
So, from now on when u see a person wearing T-shirt with ‘Thankyou Seetha” written on it u should understand that..
>He’s a Seetha fan
>He’s either a photographer or an engineer
>He probably uses windows!
Seetha is the second name in that list, the first one “Thomas Knoll” the father of PS is not actively participating in coding as far as I know! So Seetha have to be the senior most guy in PS team, I Guess!!
