Photoshop is widely considered the best image-editing software in the world today by a long way, and it is not difficult to see why. Photoshop offers incredibly advanced effects which would previously have taken days or weeks to accomplish, and reduces them to the level of a few settings and a few clicks.
Although it is expensive, today it is considered an essential program for anyone working with graphics, whether it's in print, on the web, or even in television and movies. This has led to a huge number of cheaper competitors (who have been largely ignored), as well as rampant piracy of Photoshop itself. To counter this, a cheaper, simpler version of Photoshop called Photoshop Elements is now available, which is especially good for beginners.
How did Photoshop get into this dominant position? Well, development started in 1987, with the first release in 1990. Since then, Adobe has been improving the software continuously, constantly taking advantage of advances in hardware power. Even now, to get the best performance out of Photoshop, you should buy as much RAM as you can afford.
It is not just Adobe's efforts that have got Photoshop where it is today, however. The program's plugin architecture has allowed there to be are all sorts of plugins available for more advanced work, including some plugins that actually cost more and do more than the program itself. In this way, Photoshop is often used much like Windows, as a platformand it would be a huge effort to get these plugins to run on any other software, making competitors effectively useless to anyone who relies on a plugin.
Today, you can get Photoshop for Windows and Mac OS (both OS 9 and OS X). If you want to use it on Linux, however, you will have to use Crossover Office, Codeweavers' program that allows some Windows software to run on Linux, but it will be quite slow. |
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