From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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 used with operating systems such as Linux using emulation software such as CrossOver Office. In the past, a port to SGI IRIX existed, but this was dropped before version 4.

Development

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 specialized set of tools for this purpose.

Photoshop also has strong links with software for media editing, animation and authoring. It works with 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 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 Enocre DVD reads them as buttons or menus.

PSD or PDD is a widely accepted file format. Software other than that from Adobe (such as Macromedia Fireworks, Corel Photo-Paint, Discreet Combustion, WinImages, GIMP, etc.) can import and edit layered PSD or PDD files.

As of 2005, 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.

Photoshop is generally considered one of the best image editing programs for raster graphics, but it has the disadvantage of a high price. This has helped a number of competing graphics tools to become popular, some of which are extremely powerful. In an attempt to recapture this lost market share, Adobe introduced a much less expensive program called Photoshop Elements that consists of Photoshop minus some of the high-end output capabilities. Consequently, Elements is useful for editing photos from consumer digital cameras and for doctoring images for the web but considerably less so for professional prepress work.

The term photoshopping is a neologism, meaning "editing an image", regardless of the program used. Adobe discourages use of the term [1] (http://www.adobe.com/misc/trade.html#photoshop) 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, B3ta 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 pastime 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).

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), (IRIX)
  • 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
  • New painting engine
• Photoshop 7.0.1 : August 2002
  • New Features :
  • Adobe Camera RAW 1.0 (optional upgrade)
• 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

See also

• Digital Negative Specification
• Photoshop tennis
• Photoshop contest
• Pixel32
• Wikipedia:Graphics tutorials
• Photoshop tutorials

Related terms

• 2D computer graphics
• Color
• Color theory
• Digital image
• Digital watermark
• Gamut
• Graphics file format

External links

• Official Page (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/)
• Adobe Camera RAW (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/cameraraw.html)
• A history of Photoshop written on the application's tenth anniversary (http://www.storyphoto.com/multimedia/multimedia_photoshop.html)
• A forum dedicated to users of Photoshop, where techniques and work can be shared (http://www.photoshoptechniques.com/forum/index.php?s=)
• Photoshop Cafe (http://www.photoshopcafe.com/)
• Photoshop related resources directory (http://www.photoshoproadmap.com/)
• Phong (http://www.phong.com/)
• National Association of Photoshop Professionals (http://www.photoshopuser.com/)
• PhotoshopSupport.com - Resource Site (http://www.photoshopsupport.com/)

Tutorials

• Good Tutorials (http://www.good-tutorials.com)
• NewTutorials.com (http://www.newtutorials.com/photoshop-tutorials.htm)
• Photosector (http://www.photosector.com/)
• Photoshop Roadmap (http://www.photoshoproadmap.com/Photoshop-tutorials)
• Phong (http://www.phong.com/tutorials/)
• Planet Photoshop (http://www.planetphotoshop.com/tutorials.html)
• Dubtastic (http://www.dubtastic.com/tutorials/)
• Photo-related Photoshop Tutorials (http://www.photographycorner.com/)
• Shiver7 (http://www.Shiver7.com/tutorials/)
• N-Sane.net (http://www.n-sane.net/tutorials.php/)
• Biorust (http://biorust.com/index.php?page=tutorial)
• Eye Digital Emotion (http://www.idigitalemotion.com/tutorials/tutorials.htm/)
• Lombergar Video Tuts (http://www.lombergar.com/tutorials.php/)
• Eyewire (http://www.eyewire.com/)
• Graphic-design.com Photoshop Tutorials (http://www.graphic-design.com/Photoshop/tutorials/index.html)
• Free Photoshop Training Video (http://www.digitalmediatraining.com/products/photoshopcs/index.html)
• Photoshop Cafe Tutorials (http://www.photoshopcafe.com/tutorials.htm)
• PhotoshopSupport.com - Tutorials (http://www.photoshopsupport.com/tutorials.html)
• TutorialPod Photoshop Tutorials and More (http://www.tutorialpod.com/)

Easter Eggs

Holding down "ctrl" in Photoshop CS while clicking Help>About Photoshop opens a very interesting screen Holding down alt, while opening the options menu on the layer pallete, dragging the cursor to 'Palette Options...' then releasing, opens a small picture of merlin, in Photoshop CS.

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