Adobe Photoshop

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.

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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.

Early history

Photoshop 1.0.7 running in System 6.
Photoshop 0.63 iconsIn 1987, Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display. This program, called Display, caught the attention of his brother John Knoll, an Industrial Light & Magic employee, who recommended Thomas turn it into a full-fledged image editing program. Thomas took a six month break from his studies in 1988 to collaborate with his brother on the program, which had been renamed ImagePro.Later that year, Thomas renamed his program Photoshop and worked out a short-term deal with scanner manufacturer Barneyscan to distribute copies of the program with a slide scanner; a "total of about 200 copies of Photoshop were shipped" this way.

During this time, John traveled to Silicon Valley and gave a demonstration of the program to engineers at Apple and Russell Brown, art director at Adobe. Both showings were successful, and Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute in September 1988.[4] While John worked on plug-ins in California, Thomas remained in Ann Arbor writing program code. Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990 for Macintosh exclusively.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 Features

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.

Buy Adobe Photoshop CS4

Adobe Photoshop CS4

Put Adobe® Photoshop® CS4 software in your hands and see what you can create. The new Adjustment panel and Masks panel give you more intuitive access to unrivaled editing power. Experiment freely with nondestructive adjustments. Explore your creativity by compositing images, text, and graphics. And work at peak efficiency in a streamlined, flexible work environment. With accelerated graphics handling, precise color correction, efficient image management, and powerful raw image processing, you can do more, faster than ever before.

Get 30% off Lightroom 2 when purchased with Photoshop CS4 software
Purchase a full or upgrade version of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2, along with a full or upgrade version of Photoshop CS4, Photoshop CS4 Extended, or Creative Suite® containing Photoshop CS4 or Photoshop CS4 Extended. See offer terms below.

Before you choose
Consider getting Photoshop CS4 as part of Adobe Creative Suite® 4 Design Standard software, which also combines Adobe InDesign® CS4, Illustrator® CS4, Acrobat® 9 Pro, and more.

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