Adobe Photoshop, or simply Photoshop, is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the current and primary market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation, 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 Macintosh.

Photoshop CS4, the current eleventh iteration of the program, was officially announced on 23 September 2008. "CS" reflects its integration with other Creative Suite products, and the number "4" represents it as the fourth version released since Adobe re-branded its products under the CS umbrella. Photoshop CS4 features additions such as the ability to paint directly on 3D models, wrap 2D images around 3D shapes, convert gradient maps to 3D objects, add depth to layers and text, get print-quality output with the new ray-tracing rendering engine, and enjoy exporting to supported common 3D formats; the new Adjustment and Mask Panels; Content-aware scaling (previously known as seam carving); Fluid Canvas Rotation and File display options . On 30 April, Adobe released Photoshop CS3 Extended, which includes all the same features of Adobe Photoshop CS3 with the addition of capabilities for scientific imaging, 3D, and high end film and video users. The successor to Photoshop CS3, Photoshop CS4, will be the first 64-bit Photoshop on consumer computers.

Early history

During this time, John traveled to Silicon Valley and gave a demonstration of the program to engineers at Apple Computer Inc. and Russell Brown, art director at Adobe. Both showings were successful, and Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute in September 1988. 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 .

Releases

see: Adobe Photoshop release history Continual revisions were made to Photoshop, with new versions released in the following years. In November 1992, a Microsoft Windows port of version 2.0 was released, and a year later it was ported to the SGI IRIX and Sun Solaris platforms. In September 1994, version 3.0 was released, which introduced layers and tabbed palettes. In February 2003, Photoshop shipped with the Camera RAW 1.x plug-in, which allowed users to import RAW formats from different digital cameras directly into Photoshop.

In October 2004, Photoshop was renamed Adobe Photoshop CS. The name uses the abbreviation CS for products in Adobe Creative Suite. The logo focused around a feather rendered in shades of blue and green, which was also used in 9.0. The 11th version, Photoshop CS4 was announced on September 23, 2008, retaining the same blue icon modeled after periodic table elements that was introduced with Photoshop CS3.