Adobe Photoshop



         


Adobe Photoshop is a bitmap graphics editor (with some text and vector graphics capabilities) published by Adobe Systems. It is the market leader for commercial bitmap image manipulation. It is usually referred to simply as "Photoshop". As with most of other Adobe's applications, Photoshop is available for Mac OS and Microsoft Windows; versions up to Photoshop CS 8.0 can also be run under operating systems such as Linux with an emulation program such as CrossOver Office.

The development of Photoshop started in 1987 by the brothers Thomas Knoll and John Knoll, although it was not until 1990 that the program was first released by Adobe. The program was intended from the start as a tool for manipulating images that were digitized by a scanner, which was a rare and expensive device in those days.

Although primarily designed to edit images for paper-based printing, Photoshop is used increasingly to produce images for the World Wide Web. Recent versions have been shipped with a separate application, ImageReady, which provides a more specialised set of tools for this purpose.

As of 2003, Photoshop is at version 8, called CS by Adobe to reflect its integration with their "Creative Suite". Photoshop CS features a revolutionary command : 'Shadow/Highlight' which allow user to 'suppress' highlights and/or 'push out' shadows while maintaining most of the 'image details' (i.e. the histogram would remain virtually unchanged).

The term photoshopping is a neologism, meaning "editing an image", regardless of the program used. Adobe discourages use of the term out of fear that it will undermine the company's trademark. The term photoshop is also used as a noun referring to the altered image. This is specially popular amongst members of the websites Something Awful, Fark and Worth1000 where photoshopping is an institution, with the goal of altering an image, subtly or blatantly, to make it humorous or just clever, by appealing to both the slapstick- or intellectual-level of humor, often via the use of obscure in-jokes and pop culture references. All three of the mentioned websites have held Photoshop competitions.

The term is sometimes used with a derogatory intent by artists to refer to images that have been retouched instead of originally produced. A common issue amongst users of all skill levels is the ability to avoid in one's work what is referred to as "the Photoshop look" (although such an issue is intrinsic to many graphics programs).

Photoshop is generally considered the best (if not the best) image editing programs for raster graphics, but it has the disadvantage of a high price. This has allowed competing programs such as Jasc Software's Paint Shop Pro and The GIMP Team's GIMP to become popular. To capture this lost market share, Adobe has introduced a much less expensive program called Photoshop Elements that consists of Photoshop minus some of the high-end output capabilities, useful for editing photos from consumer digital cameras and for doctoring images for the web but not as useful for professional prepress work.

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