History

• In 1987, brothers Thomas, a grad student, and John Knoll, a special effects artist for George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, began working on the foundation for an image editing software program. In 1988, their labors resulted in Image Pro, Photoshop's forerunner, which they sold 200 copies of to Barneyscan, a scanner manufacturer. Following an unsuccessful attempt to sell the software to Aldus, the Knolls won the executives at Adobe over. Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was released in February 1990.
  
  

Versions

• Since its introduction in 1990, Photoshop has been upgraded 13 times. Adobe identified the editions by the software's name followed by the version number (1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc.) from 1990 to 2002. Following the release of Photoshop 7.0 in 2002, the company decided to combine its most popular desktop publishing applications, such as Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator, into one package: Creative Suite. Creative Suite was released in 2003 and has undergone five version upgrades since, though the CS5.5 package contains the CS5 version of Photoshop.
  
  

Functions

• Photoshop gives you the tools needed to perform a variety of image-manipulating and editing functions, such as recoloring, brushing and cropping. These processes are performed by using one of the program's various tools, including the magic wand, the pen tool, the brush tool and the gradient tool. Photoshop also enables you to perform several photographic coloring tasks, such as blending background and foreground color and converting color images to black and white, or grayscale. The software also allows you to "path" objects within a photo. A "pathed" object is a section of the photo that has had all other image elements removed, or cropped, leaving just the element, regardless of shape.
  
  

Competition

• At the time of publication, Photoshop is the world's top-selling digital image editing software application. A few companies have attempted to cut into Photoshop's supremacy, including GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), Pixelmator and Corel Painter. Thomas Knoll, co-creator of Photoshop, remains involved in the development of Photoshop, aiming to keep it at the forefront of the industry's development. As of 2011, Thomas Knoll manages Adobe's Camera Raw plug in for Photoshop.