[Photoshop] What's 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 the12th 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

  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.

  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 programs such as Macromedia FreeHand (now defunct), Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape or CorelDraw, which are 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 asAdobe Illustrator where changes can be made, then after saving it, the Smart Object will be automatically updated in Photoshop.

  Photoshop uses 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, and.JPEG.

  New productivity features include a streamlined interface, improved Camera RAW support, 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 and contrast adjustment and Vanishing Point module were enhanced. The Black and White adjustment option improves 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.

  Photoshop CS4 features a new 3D engine allowing painting directly on 3D models, wrapping 2D images around 3D shapes, converting gradient maps to 3D objects, adding depth to layers and text, getting print-quality output with the new ray-tracing rendering engine. It supports common 3D formats; the new Adjustment and Mask Panels; Content-aware scaling (seam carving); Fluid Canvas Rotation and File display options. 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 (only on Windows – the OS X version is still 32-bit only.)

   Photoshop CS5 was launched on April 12, 2010. In a video posted on its official Facebook page, the development team revealed the new technologies under development, including three dimensional brushes and warping tools.

In May 2011, Adobe Creative Suites 5.5 (CS5.5) were released which have new versions of some of the applications. However, the Photoshop that comes with them which is labeled version 12.1 is identical to the concurrently released update for Photoshop CS5, version 12.0.4, except for support for the new subscription pricing that was introduced with CS5.5.

   Photoshop is available in the following languages:

Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

  Photoshop functionality can be extended by add-on programs called Photoshop plugins (or plug-ins). Some of the plug-ins are created by Adobe itself, for example Adobe Camera Raw; but most of them are developed by third-party companies, according to Adobe's specifications. Some are free and some are commercial software. Most Photoshop plug-ins can only work with Photoshop or Photoshop-compatible hosts, but a few can also be run as standalone applications.

   Although Adobe allows creating a various types of the plugins, such as filter, export, import, selection, automation, etc., the most popular are the filter plugins (also known as a 8bf plugins) available from under the Filter menu of Photoshop. These filter plugins can either modify the current image or create the all new content. Here are some popular types of such plug-ins (plus the companies whose products are the best known in the particular segment):

• Color correction plugins (Alien Skin Software, Nik Software, OnOne Software, Topaz Labs Software, The Plugin Site, etc.)
• Special effects plugins (Alien Skin Software, Auto FX Software, AV Bros., Flaming Pear Software, etc.)
• 3D effects plugins (Andromeda Software, Strata, etc.)

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 lis