Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop, or simply Photoshop, is a graphics editing program (also known as a DPD, Desktop Publishing Program) developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the current and primary 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"[1] and was one of the early "killer applications" on the PC.[2] Adobe's 2005 "Creative Suite" rebranding led to Adobe Photoshop 8's renaming to Adobe Photoshop CS. , 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.[3] Adobe countered by including SafeCast DRM starting with Adobe Photoshop CS.

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.[4] 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.[5] 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. [4] 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.[6]

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 Illustrator, Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Adobe Encore to make professional standard DVDs and provide non-linear editing and special effects services, such as backgrounds, textures, and soon, 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 is a pixel-based image editor, unlike Adobe Illustrator, which is a vector-based image editor. 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, and Fireworks. 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 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. Photoshop's popularity means that the .PSD format is widely used, and it is supported to some extent by most competing software. The .PSB (Large Document Format) 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 Photoshop CS3 is marketed with three main components of improvement over previous versions: "Work more productively, edit with unrivalled power, and composite with breakthrough tools."[7] 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 Brightness/Contrast adjustment and Vanishing Point module were enhanced. The Black and White adjustment option improves users control over manual grayscale conversions with a dialog box similar to that of Channel Mixer. Compositing is assisted with Photoshop's new Quick Selection and Refine Edge tools and improved.. image stitching technology.[7]

CS4 Photoshop CS4 features additions such as the ability to paint directly on 3D models, wrap 2D images around 3D shapes, convert gradient maps to 3D objects, add depth to layers and text, get print-quality output with the new ray-tracing rendering engine, and enjoy exporting to supported common 3D formats; the new Adjustment and Mask Panels; Content-aware scaling (also known as seam carving[9]); Fluid Canvas Rotation and File display options.[10] On 30 April, Adobe released Photoshop CS4 Extended, which includes all the same features of Adobe Photoshop CS4 with the addition of capabilities for scientific imaging, 3D, and high end film and video users. The successor to Photoshop CS3, Photoshop CS4, is the first 64-bit Photoshop on consumer computers.[11]

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.

Trademark 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.[12] Nevertheless, photoshop is commonly used as a verb.[13] Also commonly shortened to "shopped", "chopped" or "shooped", these terms have become the modern replacement of the term "airbrushed" when used to describe photo retouching in general. (Prior to digital photography, airbrushes were used to apply pigments to photographic negatives to enhance or obscure detail.)

Marquee Tool The Marquee tool allows the user to select an area of the image and manipulate it to the exclusion of non-selected areas. It also provides an easy way to copy or move only a portion of the image. Once the marquee tool is used to make a selection, the selection shape can be shifted to over areas of the image by clicking within the marquee and dragging to the new location. Note that this does not move the selected image as well, it just allows you to manipulate other parts of the image using the same selection shape. Selections can be de-selected by either clicking with the marquee tool outside of the marquee area or using the menu option Select > Deselect. Move Tool The Move tool is often considered one of Photoshops simplest, most basic features. And in many respects it is: the tools primary function is to allow you to drag elements of an image around the page until you find the right spot. Alternatively, by using the arrow keys you can move the layer by a pixel at a time, giving you more precision than the mouse offers. But its also got some powerful features that allow great manipulation and alignment of multiple layers and shapes on the page that are often overlooked by the average user. Lasso Tool Using the marquee tools, your selections are limited by the constraints of shape. Sometimes you need to select a part of your image, and the marquee shapes wont do the trick. This is where the lasso comes in freehand selection. The keyboard shortcut for the lasso is L. You can deselect a lasso selection using the menu option Select > Deselect. Healing Brush The healing brush allows you to fix imperfections in your image such as marks and skraches It works by sampling a similar area of the image. For instance, to fix a skin blemish, you would choose to sample a patch of clear skin. The healing brush matches the texture, lighting and shading of the sampled pixels with those of the pixels youre touching up, so that the fix is seamless and doesnt look unnatural or out of place.
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Patch Tools The Patch Tool is very much like the Healing Brush, but instead of using a brush to fix blemishes and flaws, it allows you to create a lasso selection around the problematic area and then move the selection to an adjacent, unflawed area. Brush Tool The brush tool is one of the most essential tools in the Photoshop artists kit. It allows the user to draw freehand lines, shapes and create interesting effects in your design. Like most other tools, its worth taking the time to fine-tune your brush options before using it. Pen Tools The Pen Tool draws vector shapes based on paths. It has been called the Bezier Tool in past versions of Photoshop. A path is essentially a line that is formed by its end-pointsthe pen tool allows you to determine where those points will go and then fills in the lines based on this information. Despite this, paths can be either straight or curved. Shape Tools The shape tools in Photoshop allow you to create vector shapes. The available shape tools are rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, polygon, line and custom shape tools. Vector shapes are based on mathematical calculations rather than pixels, so they resize smoothly and are easily modified.

What is a Photoshop Filter? Photoshop filters and plugins started to come on to the market in the early 90s. Early Photoshop filter sets included KPT Power Tools 1, Andromeda, Gallery Effects, Ring of Fire, Black Box plugins, and many others. Since then, Photoshop filters have appeared in ever increasing numbers, and there are probably now 3000 or 4000 filters available, many of them are mentioned on this site. A wide variety of different filter plugin effects exist, from super professional and wacky-interfaced KPT Spheroid Designers (from the legendary Kai Krause), all the way to more humble plugin (but still excellent) creative tools such as the Filter Factory Filters. A plugin can take many different forms: image processing, text, file formats, selections, production filters, automation and more, but the most common is probably the special effect. The special effect can take the form of simply shifting a pixel to the left or perhaps adding a frame or a variety of frames or changing the color of a pixel or adding an emboss or fractal to an image. Plugins are generally developed using the Adobe Photoshop SDK in Visual C++. Other plugin creating tools exist such as the Filter Factory tool (which used to come supplied with Photoshop) and the Filtermeister plugin. The end result of the creation of the plugin is a .dll that can be loaded upon startup by Photoshop or other application. If the application and the plugin fully support the Photoshop plugins format, the plugin will work in basically the same way in all applications though as with all things, the format and the host applications are always changing and so not all plugins support automation or actions say (even now). Many applications have their own native plugins and these are generally not swappable between applications. Each application offers its own unique take on a plugin effect or might offer additional effects not found in any available plugin set. A large number of plugins exist and I would suggest checking out a number of plugin websites and downloading their demo plugins, most offer 15 or 30 day trials. One site I recommend is FreePhotoshop.