Adobe Photoshop, also known as Photoshop, is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is presently the primary market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation, and is the flagship product of Adobe Systems. Many consider it to be the industry standard. This program is written in the C++ programming language. As you may well imagine, competitive software abounds and you should seriously examine your specific needs before committing to any product.
At the time of this writing the current version is Photoshop CS4. This product has several new features, in particular high-end capabilities for manipulating three-dimensional objects. Should you so wish, you can now wrap two-dimensional images around three-dimensional shapes.
Photoshop software dates back to 1987 when Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display. Thomas’s brother John suggested extending the program to an image editing program. The brothers worked on it together. The first major version was released in 1990 for the Apple Macintosh. In 1992 the program was first released for Microsoft Windows. It was subsequently ported to Unix computers and now runs on Linux as well.
Photoshop is highly integrated with other Adobe software products that handle media editing, animation, and authoring. As may be expected, it’s quite easy to transfer files from one Adobe application to another.
Photoshop works with individual picture elements called pixels, while its sister product, Adobe Illustrator, uses vectors that are points, lines, and curves described by mathematical equations. Photoshop can utilize many color models including RGB (Red Green Blue) and grayscale. It can read and write popular image formats including .EPS, .PNG, .GIF, .JPEG, and Fireworks. It also has several native file formats including the .PSD (Photoshop Document) format that stores an image englobling advanced features and the .PSB (Large Document Format) format designed for files that exceed 2 gigabytes. Given Photoshop’s popularity, competitive products often support some .PSD features.
Adobe Photoshop CS3 is available in about twenty languages including Arabic (Middle Eastern version), two versions of Chinese, Hebrew (Middle Eastern version), Japanese, and Russian. The Middle Eastern version was specifically developed for Arabic and Hebrew languages which go from right to left. Users of this version can mix right-to-left and left-to-right text.
Adobe sells a consumer-oriented version of Photoshop called Adobe Photoshop Elements. This relatively low-cost software comes with a user-friendly interface and new tools such as the “red-eye” reduction brush that are pitched at amateurs. Be careful, depending on what you are doing you may require a professional version such as CS3 or CS4 or competitive products. One size does not fit all.
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