Adobe Photoshop

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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. In the past, a port to SGI IRIX existed, but this was dropped before version 4.

Photoshop CS under Mac OS X.

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). It also comes with Adobe Camera RAW, a plugin developed by Thomas Knoll which has the ability to read several RAW file formats from various digital cameras and import them directly into Photoshop. A preliminary version of the RAW plugin was also available for Photoshop 7.0.1 as a $99 USD optional purchase.

Adobe Camera RAW plugin under Win XP.

The term photoshopping is a neologism, meaning "editing an image", regardless of the program used. Adobe discourages use of the term [1] out of fear that it will undermine the company's trademark; an alternate term which leaves out the Photoshop reference is "photochop". 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. A very recent and even more obscure variety of this, is the so called "Fake": extreme parodying of the current celebrity culture, by blending famous faces with nude or pornographic images. Photoshop competitions in all these varieties have become a favourite passtime for many professional and amateur users of the software.

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 one of 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.

Contents

Release history

Photoshop 1.0 (Mac OS) : February 1990
Photoshop 2.0 (Mac OS) : June 1991
- Code Name : Fast Eddy
- New Features :
- Added Paths
Photoshop 2.0.1 (Mac OS): January 1992
Photoshop 2.5 (Mac OS): November 1992
- Code Names : Merlin (Mac), Brimstone (Windows)
Photoshop 2.5.1 (Mac OS): 1993
Photoshop 3.0 : September 1994 (Mac) - November 1994 (Win)
- Code Name : Tiger Mountain (Mac OS)
- New Features :
- Tab Palettes
Photoshop 4.0 : November 1996
- Code Name : Big Electric Cat
- New Features:
- Adjustment Layers
- Editable type (previously, type was rasterized as soon as it was added)
Photoshop 4.0.1 : August 1997
Photoshop 5.0 : May 1998
- Code Name : Strange Cargo
- New Features:
- Color Management
Photoshop 5.0.1 : 1999
Photoshop 5.5 : February 1999
- New Features:
- Extract
- Vector Shapes
Photoshop 6.0 : September 2000
- Code Name : Venus in Furs
- introduced the 'liquify' filter
Photoshop 6.1 : March 2001
Photoshop 7.0 : April 2002
- Code Name : Liquid Sky
- New Features :
- Made text fully vector
- Healing Brush
Photoshop 7.0.1 : August 2002
- New Features :
- Adobe Camera RAW 1.0 (optional)
Photoshop CS : October 2003
- Code Name : Dark Matter
- New Features :
- Adobe Camera RAW 2.0
- Shadow/Highlight Command
- Match Colour command
- 'Lens blur' filter
- Real-Time Histogram

External links

Tutorials

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