The image was actually not Photoshopped! It had an awesome story behind it. So let’s know the entire story behind this cool Windows XP wallpaper “Bliss” The Iconic Windows Wallpaper “Bliss” was actually taken by Charles O’Rear in the year 1996. He was once a photographer for National Geographic. Charles O’Rear, a resident of the nearby Napa Valley, took the photo on film with a medium-format camera while he was driving through northern California’s wine growing territory. He was on the way to visit his girlfriend in 1996. It was widely believed later that the image was digitally manipulated or even created with software such as Adobe Photoshop, O’Rear says it never was. Charles O’Rear submitted this photograph to Corbis, the stock photo and image licensing service founded by Bill Gates in 1989. Several years later, Microsoft engineers chose a digitized version of the image and licensed it from O’Rear when they were about to Launch Windows XP in 2001. It is said that Charles O’Rear was paid with the largest amount ever paid for a single photograph. This is how the place looked like when Simon Goldin clicks the image at the same spot 10 years later. However, the saddest part is Microsoft had stopped giving support for Windows XP in 2014. Here’s the video made by Microsoft about Charles O’Rear and his famous photograph “Bliss” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVXY8OEZAEQ
