Photoshop Photoshop is a graphics editor (with some text and vector graphics capabilities) developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the market leader for commercial bitmap image manipulation, and probably the most well-known piece of software produced by Adobe Systems. Currently it is released as Creative Suite 4, though CS versions 1-3 are still used commercially by many organisations.
It is usually referred to simply as "Photoshop". Photoshop is currently available for Mac OS and Microsoft Windows; versions up to Photoshop 7 can also be used with other operating systems such as Linux using software such as CrossOver Office. Past versions of the program were ported to the SGI IRIX platform, but official support for this port was dropped after version 3.
Although primarily designed to edit images for paper-based printing, Photoshop is used increasingly to produce images for the World Wide Web. Recent versions bundle a related application, Adobe ImageReady, to provide a more specialized set of tools for this purpose.
Photoshop
also has strong links with software for media editing, animation and
authoring. It works with Adobe ImageReady, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe
Premiere, Adobe After Effects & Adobe Encore DVD to make
professional standard DVDs, provide non-linear editing and special
effects services such as backgrounds, textures and so on for
television, film and the web. Photoshop's native file format (PSD or
PDD) can be exported to and from Adobe ImageReady, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere, After Effects and Adobe Encore DVD.
Photoshop CS broadly supports making menus and buttons for DVDs. For
PSD or PDD files exported as a menu or button, it only needs to have
layers, nested in layer sets with a cueing format and Adobe Encore DVD
reads them as buttons or menus. PSD or PDD is a widely accepted file format. Competing bitmap image editing programs (such as Macromedia Fireworks, Corel Photo-Paint, Pixel32, WinImages, GIMP, Jasc Paintshop Pro etc.) can import and edit layered PSD or PDD files.
Photoshop can deal with a number of different color spaces:
- sRGB color space (white point=D65) - "RGB" in photoshop
- Lab color space (white point=D50) - "Lab" in photoshop
- CMYK color model
- Grayscale
The most recent version, in 2009, is version 11. This iteration of the program is marketed as "Photoshop CS4". "CS" reflects its integration with "Adobe's Creative Suite" and a number "4" because it is the fourth version released since Adobe rebranded their products under the CS umbrella. In an effort to break away from previous versions of the application and to reinforce its belonging with the new line of products, Photoshop even dropped one classic graphic feature from its packaging: the Photoshop eye, which was present in different manifestations from versions 3 to 7. Photoshop CS versions now use feathers as a form of identification.
The latest versions come with Adobe Camera RAW, a plugin developed by Thomas Knoll which can 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.
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