Adobe Photoshop

Features

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 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 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, Discreet Combustion, WinImages, GIMP, etc.) can import and edit layered PSD or PDD files.

The most recent version, as of 2005, is version 8. This iteration of the program is marketed as "Photoshop CS" to reflect its integration with "Adobe's Creative Suite". In an effort to break away with previous versions of the application and to reinforce its belonging with the new line of products, Photoshop dropped even one classic graphic feature from its packaging: the Photoshop eye, which was present in different manifestations from versions 4 to 7. Photoshop CS now uses feathers as a form of identification.

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. Photoshop Elements retails for $99 USD MSRP, compared to Photoshop's retail price of $649 USD.

Cultural impact

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).

In recent times, Photoshop has been used for altering and drawing vehicles, usually cars, in a process known as 'digi-modding','photochopping' or 'virtual-tuning'. About twenty websites in recent years have been established, including Photoshopedup (PSU) and Photochop.net. The rate of expansion of this 'new' type of art is huge. Although the websites that provide a base for people to 'showoff' their 'chops', 'Photo-manipulated' cars have been in automotive magazines for years.

Development

Release history