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Friday, August 29, 2008

Software for Digital Image Editing

By David Peters


It is easy to see why Photoshop is considered to be the premier image-editing software available today. The Photoshop program contains exceptionally sophisticated effects that in the past would have taken a great deal of time and effort to achieve and condenses the steps to reach these effects to only a few simple clicks.

Photoshop does come with a price tag that some may consider high, especially when there are freeware editors available, but with the wide expanse of features it offers, it is considered a vital program for anyone working with any graphics medium from print to the web and even to movies and television.

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.

From where did Photoshop make its meteoric rise? The program was first developed in 1987 and was released on the market in 1990. Adobe has made sure to stay on top of advances since especially in relation to hardware power and has revamped Photoshop accordingly. Even now, to get the most out of the Photoshop program, you should invest in as much RAM as possible for your computer.

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 platform - and 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.

Photoshop for Windows and Mac OS (both OS 9 and OS X) are offered today. Should you desire to use it on Linux though, you will have to utilize Crossover Office, Codeweavers' program that lets some Windows software to run on Linux however it will be quite slow.

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