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Photoshop)
Adobe Photoshop is a bitmap graphics editor (with some text and vector graphics capabilities) developed and 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 Adobe's other applications, Photoshop is available for Mac OS and Microsoft Windows; versions up to Photoshop 7 can also be used with operating systems such as Linux using software such as CrossOver Office. Past versions of the program were ported to the SGI IRIX platform, but official support for this port was dropped after version 3.
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 photoshopping is a neologism, meaning "editing an image", regardless of the program used. Adobe discourages use of the term [1] 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).
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
The brothers Thomas Knoll and John Knoll began development on Photoshop in 1987. Version 1 was released by Adobe in 1990. 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.
Release history
- Photoshop 1.0 (Mac OS) : February 1990
- Photoshop 2.0 (Mac OS) : June 1991
- Code Name : Fast Eddy
-
New Features :
- Photoshop 2.0.1 (Mac OS): January 1992
- Photoshop 2.5 (Mac OS): November 1992
- 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 :
- 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:
- Photoshop 5.0.1 : 1999
- Photoshop 5.5 : February 1999
- Photoshop 6.0 : September 2000
- 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 :
- Camera RAW 1.x (optional plugin)
- Photoshop CS : October 2003
-
Code Name : Dark Matter
-
New Features :
- Camera RAW 2.x
- Shadow/Highlight Command
- Match Colour command
- 'Lens blur' filter
- Real-Time Histogram
- Photoshop CS2 : April 2005
- Code Name : Space Monkey
-
New Features :
- Camera RAW 3.x
- 'Smart Objects'
- Image Warp
- Spot healing brush
- Red-Eye tool
- Lens Correction filter
- Smart Sharpen
- Vanishing Point
Easter Eggs
Holding down Ctrl (in Windows) or the Command key (on Mac versions) in Photoshop while selecting Help→About or Photoshop→About Photoshop (on Mac versions) from the menu shows a different version of the "About" screen with a special graphic. This graphic is different in each version, and is based on the code name for that version (e.g., "Dark Matter" for Photoshop CS or "Big Electric Cat" for version 4). This also works in ImageReady and several other Adobe applications.
In Photoshop CS, holding down Alt while selecting "Palette Options" on the layer palette will open a window with a small picture of Merlin.
Alternatives
There are many other bitmap-graphics editors available, but none have come close to Photoshop's popularity among professionals. The closest competitors would be the open-source GIMP, Macromedia Fireworks, Corel Photo-Paint and Paint Shop Pro.
See also
Related terms
External links
Official websites
Other websites
Tutorials
Last updated: 10-19-2005 19:40:24
