Jeff got his start at Adobe in Display PostScript working on Unix versions of Photoshop. That is where he also started understanding how imaging works.

As a software engineer, Jeff was not familiar with the graphics side of a computer and terms like “RGB” meant nothing to him… but all that changed the day Todor Georgiev, senior research scientist at Adobe, asked him, “Jeff, do you want to work on something interesting?”

That “interesting” project started out as a scratch remover. As Todor and Jeff discussed it, Jeff remembered a heat transfer class he had taken in school. By applying a heat transfer equation (or the smooth diffusion of heat) to an image, the scratch remover became the tool that no Photoshop user can live without – The Healing Brush.

From there, Jeff went on to apply his unique custom knowledge: to bridge the various cross-functional aspects of software development with user interface design.

Beginning with the Healing Brush and Patch tool in version 7, Jeff went on to lead the effort on the Spot Healing Brush, Match Color, Smart Sharpen, Reduce Noise, Auto-Align, Auto-Blend, Quick Selection, Refine Edge, Color Range improvement, Lens Correction improvement, HDR toning improvement, Puppet Warp, Adaptive Wide Angle, Deco Pattern, and the Content-Aware family of Scale, Fill, Patch and Move.

When asked what Photoshop means to him, Jeff said, “Photoshop is very important to me on a personal level. In a sense, I slowly discovered myself by working on it. Photoshop helped me to understand myself better.”

Jeff’s contribution to Photoshop has truly changed its users lives by making them more productive than ever before. He has fulfilled a living legacy of being a person that has helped other people to grow, helped other engineers to grow, and helped Adobe to grow – yet he still continues to challenge himself and his team to reach higher every day.