Photoshop is a famous photo manipulation and graphic design computer software application by Adobe. With time, you may sometimes experience errors with its installation that causes it to cease to work properly. Even if the error is not very serious, you may notice significant slow down while the application loads, an unexpected workspace reorganization or loss of the saved preferences. When this thing happens, you would have to reinstall this software for fixing the issues.
Photoshop was created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, it has become the de facto industry standard in raster graphics editing, such that the terms “photoshopping” and “photoshop contest” were born. It can edit and compose raster images in multiple layers and supports masks, alpha compositing and several color models including RGB, CMYK, Lab color space (with capital L), spot color and duotone. Photoshop has vast support for graphic file formats but also uses its own PSD and PSB file formats which support all the aforementioned features. In addition to raster graphics, it has limited abilities to edit or render text, vector graphics (especially through clipping path), 3D graphics and video. Photoshop’s featureset can be expanded by Photoshop plug ins, programs developed and distributed independently of Photoshop that can run inside it and offer new or enhanced features.
Photoshop files have default file extension as .PSD, which stands for “Photoshop Document.” A PSD file stores an image with support for most imaging options available in Photoshop. These include layers with masks, transparency, text, alpha channels and spot colors, clipping paths, and duotone settings. This is in contrast to many other file formats (e.g. .JPG or .GIF) that restrict content to provide streamlined, predictable functionality. A PSD file has a maximum height and width of 30,000 pixels, and a length limit of 3 Gigabytes.
Photoshop files sometimes have the file extension .PSB, which stands for “Photoshop Big” (also known as “large document format”). A PSB file extends the PSD file format, increasing the maximum height and width to 300,000 pixels and the length limit to around 4 Exabytes. The dimension limit was apparently chosen arbitrarily by Adobe, not based on computer arithmetic constraints (it is not close to a power of two, as is 30,000) but for ease of software testing. PSD and PSB formats are documented.
Photoshop functionality can be extended by add on programs called Photoshop plugins (or plug ins). Adobe creates some plugins, such as Adobe Camera Raw, but third party companies develop most plugins, according to Adobe’s specifications. Some are free and some are commercial software. Most plugins work with only Photoshop or Photoshop compatible hosts, but a few can also be run as standalone applications.
Photoshop includes a few versions of the pen tool. The pen tool creates precise paths that can be manipulated using anchor points. The free form pen tool allows the user to draw paths freehand, and with the magnetic pen tool, the drawn path attaches closely to outlines of objects in an image, which is useful for isolating them from a background.
Photoshop and derivatives such as Photoshopped (or just Shopped) have become verbs that are sometimes used to refer to images edited by Photoshop, or any image manipulating program. Such derivatives are discouraged by Adobe because, in order to maintain validity and protect the trademark from becoming generic, trademarks must be used as proper nouns.
Photoshop CS2, released in May 2005, expanded on its predecessor with a new set of tools and features. It included an upgraded Spot Healing Brush, which is mainly used for handling common photographic problems such as blemishes, red eye, noise, blurring and lens distortion. One of the most significant inclusions in CS2 was the implementation of Smart Objects, which allows users to scale and transform images and vector illustrations without losing image quality, as well as create linked duplicates of embedded graphics so that a single edit updates across multiple iterations.
