Photoshop, What is it?

Photoshop is an image manipulation program developed by Adobe. It is sold on it's own or in a package of several multimedia manipulation tools known as the "Creative Suite". The newest package is the Creative Suite 4, brinigng small additions and revisions over it's predecessor, CS3.

So, why do we use it?

There are many reasons as to why people may use photoshop. I mainly use it for fun but sometimes, it is pretty useful when having to do projects involving images or animation.
The things we can create with photoshop are endless. Ranging from simple or complex picture enhancement; forum signatures or avatars; website designing; or abstract images, it can prove to be very useful for many different purposes.
The need for such applications has increased over the years. I only used Dreamweaver once prior to uni, and that was to create a website from scratch for a school project. In those days, it wasn't licensed under Adobe and Photoshop was a software not many people knew or cared about, except companies. Now, Photoshop has become somewhat of a standard for image manipulation enthusiasts. If you were to ask someone what they used to create their avatar or signature, I'm sure they will say "Photoshop" or "GIMP". Recently, I combined the use of Photoshop and Dreamweaver to create a website. I didn't think it was possible, but through these software revisions over the years, Adobe has made such things easy to do.

New features added within CS4 include animations (without the need of Adobe Flash) and 3D rendering (I don't remember it being in CS3). I don't use 3D rendering because my GFX card doesn't support it, meaning it's software rendered and, in turn, very slow.

Photoshop is not a hard program to get to know. It's complexity ranges way, way lower to a programming language. It's easy to teach yourself how to use photoshop, you just have to keep using it to get use to all the tools avaliable. I will discuss the different tools and their purpose later in the blog.

There are alternatives avaliable to Photoshop which some people may find easier to use. I personally prefer it [Photoshop] because I've used it longer but some others avaliable are GIMP (free) and Microsoft Expression. The Expression package is only really necessary for creation Silverlight Applications though but I'll name it incase you want to check it out.

So, hopefully that's given you an idea on what Photoshop is. In the next post I'll be going over the tools, their purposes and the importance of them.