Photoshop

= Adobe Photoshop = toc Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editing program designed and sold by Adobe Systems Incorporated. Now in its 21st year of production, Photoshop remains the industry standard for graphics programs, and the incorporation of the "creative suites" or CS allows to sell combined programs at a reduced price. Among its many capabilities are functions such as Originally intended for Mac users only, Photoshop now works with Windows and Linux as well. Its CS variations are now up to CS5, released in 2010.
 * image correction
 * color, contrast, and tone control
 * editing and enhancing images by resizing, removing unwanted "noise," and image replacement
 * using the painting and drawing toolset to subtract, add, or enhance images as a "digital canvas," and using Photoshop Lightroom 3.

History
Photoshop's interesting history began with two brothers, John and Thomas Knoll, working out of their father's darkroom in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After acquiring a Macintosh in 1987, Thomas realized that gray-scale images could not be displayed on the computer's monochrome display. To work around this, he and John began building systems of image-programming that eventually culminated in the application, "Display." After tinkering again with the program, they started shopping around "ImagePro" in 1988. Despite being turned down in Silicon Valley, a company named BarneyScan was interested enough to distribute what was now called "Photoshop" with their own slide scanners. Eventually, Adobe became ennamored with the product and agreed to a license. Photoshop 1.0 was shipped out in February 1990.

Pixels and Vector-Based Images
Some of Photoshop's capabilities are displayed below. From left to right: automatic lens correction, lens correction filter improvement, straighten image tool, and the gradient tool for gradient adjustments.



The working Photoshop document is the .PSD format, which is also supported in other Adobe software. As opposed to constrained GIFF files, for example, the .PSD format allows for layer adjustments to enhance and re-design images. Photoshop is a pixel editor, rather than a vector-based editor. Graphic images composed of pixels means they are divided up by single pixel points, and an image's resolution depends on the quality of the monitor and how many pixels it can display. Photoshop enables users to manipulate an image's pixels to achieve their desired visual needs. Pixel images are also known as bit-map graphics or raster images. Essentially, a pixel-based image is a "blend" of all the hundreds of pixels that make up the image. In contrast, vector-based images are dependent on lines and points. Editing vector-based images is easier because the more subtle uses of graphic design do not apply to their more geometric origins. Vector images are great for logos but not so much for images, because of the many layers that go into comprising an image's pixel construction, as displayed in the example below. That is where Photoshop becomes such a useful graphics-editing tool.



**References**
(2009). Basics: Difference between pixel and vector-based graphics. Retrieved from http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/design/pixel-vector-graphics-difference/ (2011). What is a pixel? Retrieved from http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/P/pixel.html Adobe CS5 Features (2011). Retrieved from http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/features.html Story, Derrick (2000). From darkroom to desktop—how Photoshop came to light. Retrieved from http://www.storyphoto.com/multimedia/multimedia_photoshop.html