What is Adobe Photoshop?

Photoshop is a verb to describe the action of modifying an image with computer software, usually MS Paint. It has been used by people everywhere to change reality when they don't like it enough.

Photoshop, a product of everyone favorite web company

Photoshop or as they want you to call it, Adobe® Photoshop® Image® Enhancement® Creation® Software® Version 6.®0®, can be very useful to create all kinds of cool and dumb pictures. A person unskilled in the photomanipulative arts can now show works displaying his unskilledness in an embarrasingly crappy manner.

Features

Photoshop has 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 duotonesettings. 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, Inkscape or CorelDraw, which arevector-based image editors.

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, .JPEG, and Adobe Fireworks.

CS3

New features propagating productivity include streamlined interface, improved Camera Raw, better control over print options, enhanced PDFsupport, 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.

CS3 Extended contains all features of CS3 plus tools for editing and importing some 3D graphics file formats, enhancing video, and comprehensive image analysis tools, utilizing MATLAB integration and DICOM file support. 

CS4

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.)

CS5 

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.

A version of Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended was used for a Prerelease Beta. A large group of selected Photoshop users were invited to beta test in mid-February 2010.