Adobe Photoshop , or simply Photoshop , is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the current market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation software, 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 the Macintosh, later also for the PC.
Adobe's 2005 "Creative Suite" rebranding led to Adobe Photoshop 8's renaming to Adobe Photoshop CS. Thus, Adobe Photoshop CS4 is the 11th 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 included in most of Adobe's Creative Suite offerings.
Photoshop's popularity, combined with its high retail price, makes Photoshop's piracy rate relatively high. Adobe countered by including SafeCast DRM starting with Adobe Photoshop CS.
Development
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 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 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.
Plugins
Main article: Photoshop pluginPhotoshop 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. Photoshop plugin API has become a standard, and many other image editors also support Photoshop Plugins.
Adobe Camera Raw (also known as ACR and Camera Raw) is a special plugin, supplied free by Adobe, used primarily to read and process raw image files so that the resultant images can be processed by Photoshop. It is invoked by attempting to open such a file, rather than from the 'Filter' menu, but like other plugins is listed in the 'Help > About Plug-In' menu (as "Camera Raw").
Trademark
Adobe discourages use of "Photoshop" as a verb, as in using photoshopping to refer to photo editing or image manipulation, to prevent its trademark from becoming a genericized trademark. Nevertheless, photoshop is commonly used as a verb.
Consumer market
While Photoshop is the industry standard image editing program for professional raster graphics and other digital art, its relatively high suggested retail price has led to a number of competing graphics tools, such as GIMP and Paint.NET, becoming popular. To compete in this market, and to counter unusually 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. Many professional features were omitted. Removing CMYK functionality, for example, initially made Elements unsuitable for commercial prepress work; paradoxically, the ability of Adobe InDesign to enable an entirely RGB workflow has meant that Elements can now be used as part of a professional workflow.
See also
- Adobe Photoshop release history
- Adobe Photoshop Express
- Image editing
- Photoshop contest
References
- ^ "Adobe in Photoshop freebie". CNN.com . 2007-03-01 . http://money.cnn.com/2007/03/01/technology/adobe/ . Retrieved 2007-04-27 .
- ^ Christopher Null (2007-04-02). "The 50 Best Tech Products of All Time". PC World . http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,130207-page,4-c,technology/article.html .
- ^ Brian Auer (2008-03-28). "60% of Photoshop Users are PIRATES!". Epic Edits Weblog . http://blog.epicedits.com/2008/03/28/60-of-photoshop-users-are-pirates/l .
- ^ a b Schewe, Jeff (2000). "Thomas & John Knoll". PhotoshopNews . http://www.photoshopnews.com/feature-stories/photoshop-profile-thomas-john-knoll-10/ . Retrieved 2007-06-15 .
- ^ Story, Derrick (2000-02-18). "From Darkroom to Desktop—How Photoshop Came to Light". Story Photography . http://www.storyphoto.com/multimedia/multimedia_photoshop.html . Retrieved 2007-06-15 .
- ^ Hormby, John (2007-06-05). "How Adobe's Photoshop Was Born". Story Photography . http://siliconuser.com/?q=node/10 . Retrieved 2007-06-15 .
- ^ Digital camera raw file support
- ^ "Permissions and trademark guidelines - Proper use of the Photoshop trademark". Adobe official site . 2007 . http://www.adobe.com/misc/trade.html#photoshop . Retrieved 2007-06-15 .
- ^ David Blatner of MacWorld on professional photoshopping .
- ^ creativepro.com - Photoshop Elements: Almost-Photoshop Image Editing at a Bargain Price.
External links
Find more about Photoshop on Wikipedia's sister projects:
Definitions from Wiktionary
Textbooks from Wikibooks
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