Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll.
"Photoshop It" is slang which unfortunately promotes software owned by one of the worst computer software companies in existence today.
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Because of the popularity and the massive array of functionality of Adobe Photoshop it is still the market dominate graphic manipulation application (c2019). The market dominance of this software has spanned three decades. However, due to their monopoly Adobe has not had motivation for any true innovation in this industry for many years, perhaps over a decade.
Adobe Photoshop is extremely popular. Originally this was clearly because nothing else available was nearly as powerful or feature rich. However, popularity is sometimes due to monopoly. This is typically the first advanced image manipulation software taught to students in academia for graphic design, web development, and desktop publishing. Students love the software as it is the only software they know.
Although Adobe Photoshop is the market dominate application for image manipulation it is not necessarily "still the best." Adobe licensing is Draconian as in very strict and overreaching, backed by Adobe's overly aggressive legal civil team some companies are now waking up and avoiding Adobe like the plague having in part to do with the fact that today there exists alternative that are equal or nearly equal to Adobe Photoshop.
The User Interface of Adobe Photoshop has never been intuitive. It takes considerable training to become proficient in the software. When compared to Jasc Paint Shop Pro, Adobe Photoshop is far more difficult to use because the UI is not logically constructed for the common computer user. It should be noted that Paint Shop Pro does more than Paint Shop Pro, however, it has been matched in features by a Free Open Source competitor called Gimp.
It is difficult to understand why graphic artists and desktop publishers continue to fork out big fees for Adobe software when FOSS Gimp can accomplish the same tasks in relatively the same way and is much more cost effective often being completely free.
The emerging world of new graphic software now threatens Adobe Photoshop by offering users practical full featured alternatives. Other Adobe market dominate products such as Flash Player are being dumped causing Adobe to lose massive chunks of market share in specific areas. Will Adobe continue to dominate the design and desktop publishing industry or will new competitors with fresh innovation and friendlier licensing continue to chip away at the Adobe monopoly?
Related Pages
- GIMP - Graphics software equal to Adobe Photoshop while also being Free and Open Source
- Paint Shop Pro - Discontinued graphics software that once served as a nice alternative to Adobe Photoshop
- XnView - A simple Linux utility that can open Photoshop, PSP, and most other graphic file types including the ability to export to other formats.
- Common Graphic File Formats for Images - Learn about the common image formats
- Adobe GetPlus DLM Vulnerability - How Adobe created and distributed their own computer virus
- Tesseract - OCR software
- Image Editing Software for Linux
- Image Viewing Software for Linux