Adobe Photoshop is a software standard for many professional graphic artists. It features many powerful tools that can do basic to advanced image manipulation efficiently with outstanding results. Photoshop is one of the prides of Adobe Systems, a company leader in developing graphic applications.

Photoshop is an ideal software in producing great quality output for web designs, advertisements, posters, photography, desktop publishing, and many other graphic works.

The latest development of the product is the Photoshop CS4, which will be released in September 2008. It features more advanced tools for enhancing images.

Features overview:

o Capable of painting directly on 3D graphics

o Wrap 2D images around 3D shapes

o Convert gradient maps to 3D objects

o Give depth to text and layers

o Better print quality output together with the inclusion of latest ray-tracing providing engine

o Supports common 3D formats

o Improved Adjustment and Mask Panels

o Fluid Canvas Rotation

o File display options

o 64 bit compatible

Presently there are eight products of the Photoshop software:

o Adobe Photoshop CS3

o Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended

o Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 for Macintosh

o Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 for Windows

o Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 & Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0

o Adobe Photoshop Express beta

o Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2

o Adobe Photoshop CS4

Adobe Photoshop can seamlessly work with other Adobe products such as Adobe Illustrator, Adobe ImageReady, Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Adobe Encore DVD.

Photoshop uses the color models lab, RGB, CMYK, binary bitmap, grayscale, and duotone. It is capable of reading and writing both raster or vector images such as EPS, PNG, GIF, JPEG, Fireworks, and many other file formats.

The traditional file formats of Photoshop are:

o PSD – Photoshop Document

o PSB – Large Document Format

o PDD – PhotoDeluxe Document

Thomas Knoll was the key person who started this amazing program we know today. It all started in 1987 when Knoll wrote a program in order to display grayscale images on his Macintosh Plus. He was able to display monochrome images in his computer. He named his program Display.

Upon knowing this, John Knoll, Thomas’ brother who was then working at Industrial Light and Magic, convinced Thomas to develop it into a full image editing software. Thomas spent six months together with his brother in developing the software. From the name Display, they changed it to ImagePro. Adobe would buy license several years later and rename it to Photoshop.

Barneyscan, a company that manufactures scanners decided to bundle the software with their products. 200 copies of the software were shipped. The software was then demonstrated by John Knoll at the Silicon Valley and Adobe impressed everybody, and later decided to purchase the license. After further developments, Photoshop 1.0 was then released to the market in 1990 but for Macintosh only.

Eventually, more developments have been made with Photoshop. The Windows version was made available eventually and reached a larger market.

Because of the popularity of the software, it was developed to support many other languages like Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

Third party plug-ins are also supported by Photoshop. These plug-ins provide more additional effects, which can be applied instantly to any images. Example is brush plug-ins.