Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editing program developed and published byAdobe Systems Incorporated.

Adobe's 2003 "Creative Suite" rebranding led to Adobe Photoshop 8's renaming to Adobe Photoshop CS. Thus, Adobe Photoshop CS5 is the 12th 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 released in two editions: Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Photoshop Extended, with the Extended having extra features available. Adobe Photoshop Extended is included in all of Adobe's Creative Suite offerings except Design Standard, which includes the Adobe Photoshop edition.

Alongside Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Extended, Adobe also publishes Adobe Photoshop Elements and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, collectively called "The Adobe Photoshop Family" by Adobe. In 2008, Adobe released Adobe Photoshop Express, a free web-based image editing tool to edit photos directly on blogs and social networking sites.

Features

Further information: Comparison of raster graphics editors#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 duotone settings. This is in contrast to many other file formats (e.g. .EPS or .GIF) that restrict content to provide streamlined, predictable functionality. PSD format is limited to a maximum height and width of 30,000 pixels. .PSB (Photoshop Big) format, also known as "large document format" within Photoshop, is the extension of PSD format to images up to 300,000 pixels in width or height. That limit was apparently chosen somewhat arbitrarily by Adobe, not based on computer arithmetic constraints (it is not close to a significant power of two, as is 30,000) but for ease of software testing. PSD and PSB formats are documented.

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 are vector-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 and .JPEG.