Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems Incorporated. Adobe's 2003 "Creative Suite" rebranding led to Adobe Photoshop 8's renaming to Adobe Photoshop CS. Thus, Adobe Photoshop CS5 is the 12th major release of Adobe Photoshop. The CS rebranding also resulted in Adobe offering numerous software packages containing multiple Adobe programs for a reduced price. Adobe Photoshop is released in two editions: Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Photoshop Extended, with the Extended having extra 3D image creation, motion graphics editing, and advanced image analysis features. Adobe Photoshop Extended is included in all of Adobe's Creative Suite offerings except Design Standard, which includes the Adobe Photoshop edition.

Alongside Photoshop and Photoshop Extended, Adobe also publishes Photoshop Elements and Photoshop Lightroom, collectively called "The Adobe Photoshop Family". In 2008, Adobe released Adobe Photoshop Express, a free web-based image editing tool to edit photos directly on blogs and social networking sites; in 2011 a version was released for the Android operating system and the iPhone. Adobe only supports Windows and Macintosh versions of Photoshop, but using Wine Photoshop CS4 can run on Linux.

Early history

In 1987, 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. This program, called Display, caught the attention of his brother John Knoll, an Industrial Light & Magic employee, who recommended Thomas turn it into a fully-fledged image editing program. Thomas took a six month break from his studies in 1988 to collaborate with his brother on the program, which had been renamed ImagePro. Later that year, Thomas renamed his program Photoshop and worked out a short-term deal with scanner manufacturer Barneyscan to distribute copies of the program with a slide scanner; a "total of about 200 copies of Photoshop were shipped" this way. During this time, John traveled to Silicon Valley and gave a demonstration of the program to engineers at Apple and Russell Brown, art director at Adobe. Both showings were successful, and Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute in September 1988. While John worked on plug-ins in California, Thomas remained in Ann Arbor writing program code. Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990 for Macintosh exclusively.

File format

The .PSD (Photoshop Document), Photoshop's native format, stores an image with support for most imaging options available in Photoshop. These include layers with masks, color spaces, ICC profiles, transparency, text, alpha channels and spot colors, clipping paths, and duotone settings. This is in contrast to many other file formats (e.g. .EPS or .GIF) that restrict content to provide streamlined, predictable functionality. PSD format is limited to a maximum height and width of 30,000 pixels. PSB (Photoshop Big) format, also known as "large document format" within Photoshop, is the extension of PSD format to images up to 300,000 pixels in width or height. That limit was apparently chosen somewhat arbitrarily by Adobe, not based on computer arithmetic constraints (it is not close to a significant power of two, as is 30,000) but for ease of software testing. PSD and PSB formats are documented.

Photoshop's popularity means that the .PSD format is widely used, and it is supported to some extent by most competing software. The .PSD file format can be exported to and from Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere Pro, and After Effects, to make professional standard DVDs and provide non-linear editing and special effects services, such as backgrounds, textures, and so on, for television, film, and the Web. Photoshop's primary strength is as a pixel-based image editor, unlike vector-based image editors. However, Photoshop also enables the creation, incorporation, and manipulation of vector graphics through its Paths, Pen tools, Shape tools, Shape Layers, Type tools, Import command, and Smart object functions. Utilization of these tools and commands provides convenience when it is desirable to combine pixel-based and vector-based images in one Photoshop document because it can eliminate the necessity to visit more than one software program and transfer files between them. However, for the initial creation of very complex vector graphics that contain numerous shapes and numerous colors, it is much easier to use a software that was created primarily for that purpose, such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw. If it is then necessary to import the complex vector object into Photoshop, it is possible to import it into Photoshop as a Smart Object. When the Smart Object is double-clicked on Photoshop's layers palette, it is opened in its original software such as Adobe Illustrator where changes can be made, then after saving it, the Smart Object will be automatically updated in Photoshop.

Cultural impact

Photoshop and derivatives such as Photoshopped (or just Shopped) have become verbs that are sometimes used to refer to images edited by Photoshop, or any image manipulating program. "Photoshop" is also used as a noun to refer to image editing programs in general. Such derivatives are discouraged by Adobe because, in order to maintain validity and protect the trademark from becoming genericized, trademarks must be used as proper adjectives. Photoshop art has become popular, for example Tao Lin has a column employing only Photoshop for captioned pieces of art for Vice. Flickr features many groups devoted to Photoshop art including one with over 10,000 members.