Presto | Mr Photo 1.5

The answer, for a glorious 18 months, lived on a single CD-ROM with a friendly, bow-tied mascot. wasn't just software. It was the digital darkroom for the rest of us. The "Easy" Button Before the Easy Button Adobe Photoshop 4.0 cost $650 and required a degree in hieroglyphics. Presto Mr. Photo 1.5 cost $39.95 (often bundled with scanners from UMAX and Mustek) and greeted you with a cartoon butler.

In the chaotic, beige-tower era of 1996, digital photography was an oxymoron. Most people still took rolls of Kodak Gold to the drugstore. But for the brave few who owned a scanner—or dared to plug a Sony Mavica floppy-disk camera into a parallel port—there was a problem: What do you actually do with a 640x480 JPEG? Presto Mr Photo 1.5

It wasn't professional. It was personal. The answer, for a glorious 18 months, lived

Once upon a time, before Photoshop was a verb and before Instagram filters were a swipe away, there was Presto Mr. Photo 1.5. The "Easy" Button Before the Easy Button Adobe Photoshop 4