What Is Photoshop?

Over the past 21 years, Photoshop has meant many different things to many different people. Whether it is used to tell a story, put ideas into motion, imagine something new, visualize science or any of its other many uses – Photoshop has touched popular culture, business and artistry around the world.

In simple terms, Photoshop is a Professional Image / Graphics editing software package, developed & published by Adobe Systems Incorporated, that can be used by experts and novices alike.

HISTORY:

It all Started In 1987 where Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan began writing a program, called Display, on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display. His brother John Knoll convinced Thomas to turn it into a fully-fledged Image Editing Program. They renamed it ImagePro. Later that same year, Thomas renamed his program Photoshop and worked out a small short-term deal with scanner manufacturer Barneyscan to distribute copies of the program with a slide scanner. They were successful in shipping 200 copies.

After a successful demonstration Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute for the program in September 1988. While John worked on the plug-ins, Thomas continued writing program code. Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990 for Macintosh exclusively.

VERSIONS & ITS FEATURES:

Unlike many other file formats (e.g. .EPS or .GIF) that restrict content to provide streamlined, predictable functionality. Layers with masks, color spaces, ICC profiles, transparency, text, alpha channels and spot colors, clipping paths, and duotone settings; are all stored in the .PSD (Photoshop Document) format, Photoshop's native format. It also stores an image with support for most imaging options available in Photoshop. PSD format is limited to a maximum height and width of 30,000 pixels. The .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 but for ease of software testing.

The popularity of Photoshop means that the .PSD format is widely used, and it is supported to some extent by most competing software's.

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.

Version History :-

• 0.63                         Macintosh                October 1988


• 1.0                           Macintosh                February 1990


• 2.0                           Macintosh                June 1991


• 2.5                           Macintosh                November 1992
                                  Windows
                                  IRIX, Solaris            November 1993


• 3.0                           Macintosh                September 1994
                                  Windows                  November 1994
                                  IRIX, Solaris


• 4.0                           Macintosh                November 1996
                                  Windows


• 5.0                           Macintosh                May 1998
                                  Windows


• 5.5                           Macintosh                February 1999
                                  Windows


• 6.0                           Macintosh                September 2000
                                  Windows


• 7.0                           Mac OS X                March 2002
                                  Windows


• CS(8.0)                   Mac OS X                October 2003
                                  Windows


• CS2 (9.0)                Mac OS X                April 2005
                                  Windows 2k / XP 


• CS3 (10.0)              Mac OS X                April 16, 2007
  Windows XP SP2


• CS4 (11.0)              Mac OS X                October 15, 2008
  Windows 


• CS5 (12.0)              Mac OS X                April 30, 2010
  Windows 


• CS6 (13.0)              Mac OS X                Beta - In Progress (July 2011)
  Windows
  

The Latest, much awaited Beta release, of CS6 was scheduled for July 2011 but was unfortunately postponed until further notice. Its referred to by its codename "Superstition".

I hope u liked this little info into Photoshop... Stay tuned for more :)