Adobe Photoshop

Type: Raster graphics editor

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 MS Windows.

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.

Features

Photoshop has strong ties with other Adobe software for media editing, animation, and authoring. 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.

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 is a pixel-based image editor, unlike programs such as Macromedia FreeHand (now defunct), Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw, which are vector-based image editors.

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 Adobe Fireworks.

Official website

Source: http://www.en.wikipedia.org/