Adobe Photoshop, or simply Photoshop, is a graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the current market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation, and is the flagship product of Adobe Systems. It has been described as "an industry standard for graphics professionals" and was one of the early "killer applications" on Macintosh.

The present (10th) iteration of the program, Photoshop CS3, was released on 16 April 2007. "CS" reflects its integration with other Creative Suite products, and the number "3" represents it as the third version released since Adobe re-branded its products under the CS umbrella. Photoshop CS3 features additions such as the ability to apply non-destructive filters, as well as new selection tools named Quick Selection and Refine Edge that make selection more streamlined. On April 30th, Adobe released Photoshop CS3 Extended, which includes all the same features of Adobe Photoshop CS3 with the addition of capabilities for scientific imaging, 3D, and high end film and video users.

Development

Early history

Photoshop 0.63 icons

In 1987, Thomas Knoll, then 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 full-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 Computer Inc. 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.

Releases

Further information: Adobe Photoshop release history
Photoshop CS in Windows

Continual revisions were made to the program, with new versions released in the following years. In November 1992, a Microsoft Windows port of version 2.0 of the software was released, and a year later it was ported to the SGI IRIX and Sun Solaris platforms. In September 1994, version 3.0 was released, which introduced layers and tabbed palettes. In February 2003, the program shipped with the Camera RAW 1.x plug-in, which allowed the user to import RAW formats from different digital cameras directly into Photoshop.

In October 2004, the program was renamed Adobe Photoshop CS. The name uses the abbreviation CS for products in Adobe Creative Suite. The logo focused around a feather, which was also used in 9.0. The 10th version, Photoshop CS3 was released on April 16, 2007, with an icon modelled after periodic table elements, matching the new icons of other Creative Suite products.

In January 2008, the Wine project announced official support for Photoshop CS2, allowing the Windows version of Photoshop CS2 to be used on Linux and other Unix platforms.

Photoshop is written in the C++ programming language.

Features

Further information: Comparison of raster graphics editors#Features

Photoshop has strong ties with other Adobe software for media editing, animation, and authoring. Files in Photoshop's native format, .PSD, can be exported to and from Adobe ImageReady, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Adobe Encore DVD 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. For example, Photoshop CS broadly supports making menus and buttons for DVDs. For .PSD files exported as a menu or button, it only needs to have layers, nested in layer sets with a cuing format, and Adobe Encore DVD reads them as buttons or menus.

Photoshop can utilize the color models RGB, lab, CMYK, grayscale, binary bitmap, and duotone. Photoshop has the ability to read and write raster and vector image formats such as: .EPS, .PNG, .GIF, .JPEG, Fireworks, etc. It also has several native file formats:

The .PSD (Photoshop Document) format stores an image with support for most imaging options available in Photoshop. These consist of 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 give streamlined, predictable functionality. Photoshop's popularity means that the .PSD format is widely used, and it is supported to some extent by most competing software.

The .PSB (Photoshop Big) format is a newer version of .PSD designed for files over 2 gigabytes.

The .PDD (PhotoDeluxe Document) format is a version of .PSD that only supports the features found in the discontinued PhotoDeluxe software.

CS3

Smart Layers display the filter without altering the original image

Photoshop CS3 is marketed with three main components of improvement over previous versions: "Work more productively, Edit with unrivaled power, and composite with breakthrough tools." New features propagating productivity include streamlined interface, improved Camera Raw, better control over print options, enhanced PDF support, and better management with Adobe Bridge. Editing tools new to CS3 are the Clone Source palette and nondestructive Smart Filters, and other features such as the Channel Mixer and Vanishing Point were enhanced. Compositing is assisted with Photoshop's new Quick Selection and Refine Edge tools and improved image stitching technology.

CS3 Extended contains all features of CS3 plus tools for editing and importing some 3D graphics file formats, enhancing video, and comprehensive image analysis tools, utilizing MATLAB integration and DICOM file support.

The logo is composed of white letters "Ps" on a gradient blue square.

Plugins

Main article: Photoshop plugins

Photoshop functionality can be extended by add-on programs called Photoshop plugins which act like mini-editors that modify the image. The most common type are filter plugins that provide various image effects. They are located in the 'Filter' menu: pre-installed plugins come first, and third-party plugins are placed below the separator.

Trademark

Look up photoshop inWiktionary, the free dictionary.

Adobe discourages use of "Photoshop" as a verb, as in using photoshopping to refer to photo editing, to prevent its trademark from becoming a genericized trademark. Nevertheless, photoshop is frequently used as a verb.

Consumer market

Photoshop Family of products logo

While Photoshop is the industry standard image editing program for professional raster graphics, its comparatively high suggested retail price has led to a number of competing graphics tools being made available at lower prices for the amateur market. To compete in this market, and to counter untypically high rates of piracy of its high end products, the company introduced a consumer-oriented version of Photoshop as Adobe Photoshop Elements. A more user-friendly interface and new tools such as the "red-eye" reduction brush were aimed firmly at the more casual image editor, although many professional features were omitted. Removing CMYK functionality, for example, made Elements unsuitable for commercial prepress work.