Adobe Photoshop

History of Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Systems for mac OS and Windows. Photoshop was created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, it has become the de facto industry standard in the editing of raster graphics, in such a way that the word "Photoshop" has become a verb like in "Photoshopea an image", "photoshopping" and "contest" of Photoshop ", although Adobe discourages such use.

You can edit and compose raster images in multiple layers and it supports masks, alpha composition and several color models including RGB, CMYK, CIELAB, flat color and duotone. Photoshop has extensive support for graphic file formats, but also uses its own PSD and PSB file formats that support all the aforementioned features. In addition to the raster graphics, it has limited capabilities for editing or rendering text, vector graphics (especially through clipping path), 3D graphics, and video. The set of Photoshop functions can be extended through Photoshop add-ons, programs developed and distributed independently of Photoshop, which can run within it and offer new or improved features.

The naming scheme in Photoshop was initially based on version numbers. However, in October 2002, after the introduction of the Creative Suite brand, each new version of Photoshop was designated with "CS" plus a number; For example, the eighth major version of Photoshop was Photoshop CS and the ninth major version was Photoshop CS2. Photoshop CS3 to CS6 were also distributed in two different editions: Standard and Extended. In June 2013, with the introduction of the Creative Cloud brand, the license scheme of Photoshop was changed to software as a service rental model and the suffixes "CS" were replaced by "CC".

Historically, Photoshop was included with additional software such as Adobe Image-Ready, Adobe Fireworks, Adobe Bridge, Adobe Device Central and Adobe Camera RAW. Along with Photoshop, Adobe also develops and publishes Photoshop Elements, Photoshop Lightroom, Photoshop Express and Photoshop Touch. Collectively, they qualify as "The Adobe Photoshop family". It is currently a licensed software.

Early history Photoshop was developed in 1987 by American brothers Thomas and John Knoll, who sold the distribution license to Adobe Systems Incorporated in 1988. Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to show grayscale images on a monochrome screen. This program, called Display, caught the eye of his brother John Knoll, an employee of Industrial Light & Magic, who recommended that Thomas convert it into a full image editing program. Thomas took a six-month break from his studies in 1988 to collaborate with his brother on the program. Thomas renamed the ImagePro program, but the name had already been taken. Later that year, Thomas renamed his Photoshop program and made a short-term agreement with the scanner maker Barneyscan to distribute copies of the program with a slide scanner; A "total of about 200 copies of Photoshop were sent" in this way. During this time, John traveled to Silicon Valley and gave a demonstration of the program to Apple engineers and Russell Brown, art director of Adobe. Both presentations were successful, and Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute in September 1988. While John was working on plug-ins in California, Thomas remained in Ann Arbor writing codes. Photoshop 1.0 was released on February 19, 1990 for the Macintosh exclusively.

The version of Barneyscan included advanced color editing features that were stripped of the first version of Adobe sent. Color management improved slowly with each Adobe release, and Photoshop quickly became the industry standard for digital color publishing. At the time that Photoshop 1.0 was launched, digital retouching in dedicated high-end systems, such as Scitex, costs around $ 300 per hour for basic photo retouching. File format Photoshop files have a default file extension such as .PSD, which means "Photoshop Document." A PSD file stores an image with support for most of the image options available in Photoshop. These include layers with masks, transparency, text, alpha channels and spot colors, clipping paths and duotone settings. This contrasts with many other file formats (e.g, .JPG or .GIF) that restrict content to provide optimized and predictable functionality.

Photoshop File Extensions

A PSD file has a maximum height and width of 30,000 pixels, and a length limit of 2 gigabytes. Photoshop files sometimes have the .PSB file extension, which means "Photoshop Big" (also known as "large document format"). A PSB file extends the PSD file format, increasing the maximum height and width to 300,000 pixels and the length limit to around 4 exabytes. The dimension limit was chosen arbitrarily by Adobe, not based on computer arithmetic constraints (it is not close to a power of two, such as 30,000), but because of the ease of software testing. The PSD and PSB formats are documented. Due to the popularity of Photoshop, PSD files are widely used and supported to a certain extent by most competing software. The .PSD file format can be exported to and from other Adobe applications, such as Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, to create standard professional DVDs and provide non-linear editing and special effects services, such as backgrounds and textures, for television, the cinema and the Internet. The main strength of Photoshop is as an image editor based on pixels, unlike the editors of vector-based images.

Other Photoshop Add-ons and Capabilities

Photoshop also allows the editing of vector graphics through their paths, pen tools, shape tools, shape layers, type tools, import command and smart object functions. These tools and commands are convenient for combining images based on pixels and vectors in a Photoshop document, since it may not be necessary to use more than one program. To create very complex vector graphics with numerous shapes and colors, it may be easier to use softwares created primarily for that purpose, such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW. Photoshop's non-destructive intelligent objects can also import complex vector shapes. Plugins The functionality of Photoshop can be extended through complementary programs called Photoshop add-ons (or plug-ins). Adobe creates some add-ons, such as Adobe Camera Raw, but third-party companies develop most of the add-ons, according to Adobe's specifications. Some are free and some are commercial software. Most add-ons work only with compatible Photoshop hosts, but some can also be run as stand-alone applications.

There are several types of add-ons, such as filter, export, import, selection, color correction and automation. The most popular add-ons are filter plug-ins (also known as 8bf plugins), available in the Photoshop Filter menu. Filter plug-ins can modify the current image or create content. Below are some popular types of add-ons, and some well-known companies associated with them: Color correction plugins (Alien skin software, Nik Software, OnOne Software, Topaz Labs Software) 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 add-on, provided free by Adobe, used primarily to read and process raw image files so that the resulting images can be processed by Photoshop. It can also be used from Adobe Bridge.