Adobe Photoshop is a leading RASTER art program (in other words, it records it's graphic data by remembering each pixel's color and location). This means you can create photo-quality artwork or edit existing photos to achieve an altered reality.
One drawback with clients sending Photoshop files is that they are usually setup totally wrong. You must setup your artwork to be 300 dpi, CMKY, and 100% size that you need it in BEFORE you starting designing. Unlike Adobe Illustrator, you cannot easily switch sizes of your final artwork. A general way to remember this is that in Photoshop, you can always shrink your artwork and maintain a clear picture, but you can only enlarge your artwork a tiny amount before it gets pixilated (tiny squares).
Photoshop is found in every professional graphic designer’s toolbox.
Photoshop File Preparation: - We prefer you to save your .psd files as .pdf files. - Make sure you include and 1/8” bleed. - Leave a 1/8” of safety. - CMYK color space.
Helpful Resources: - Purchase Illustrator from Adobe here. - Get help from the online community here.
A nice summary by Wikipeida.org: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Photoshop)
Adobe Photoshop, or simply Photoshop, is a graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the current market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation, and, in addition to Adobe Acrobat, is the best-known piece of software produced by Adobe Systems. It is considered the industry standard in most jobs related to the use of visual elements.
Photoshop is available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Mac OS; versions up to Photoshop 9.0 can also be used with other operating systems such as Linux using software such as CrossOver Office. Past versions of the program were ported to the SGI IRIX and Sun Solaris platforms, but official support for this port was dropped after version 3.
Features Although primarily designed to edit images for paper-based printing, Photoshop is used increasingly to produce images for the World Wide Web. Recent versions bundle a related application, Adobe ImageReady, to provide a more specialized set of tools for this purpose.
Photoshop also has strong ties with other Adobe software for media editing, animation and authoring. Files in Photoshop's native format, .PSD, can be exported to and from Adobe ImageReady, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects and Adobe Encore DVD to make professional standard DVDs, provide non-linear editing and special effects services such as backgrounds, textures and so on for television, film and the Web. For example, Photoshop CS broadly supports making menus and buttons for DVDs. For .PSD files exported as a menu or button, it only needs to have layers, nested in layer sets with a cueing format and Adobe Encore DVD reads them as buttons or menus.
Photoshop can deal with a number of different color models: · RGB color model · Lab color model · CMYK color model · Grayscale · Bitmap · Duotone
File formats
Photoshop has the ability to read and write raster and vector image formats such as .png, .gif, .jpeg, etc.
It also has several native file formats: · The PSD (Photoshop Document) format stores an image as a set of layers, including text, masks, opacity, blend modes, color channels, alpha channels, clipping paths, and duotone settings. Photoshop's popularity means that the PSD format is widely used, and it is supported to some extent by most competing software. · The PSB format is a newer version of PSD designed for files over 2 GB. · The PDD format is a version of PSD that only supports the features found in the discontinued PhotoDeluxe software.
The development of digital image manipulation redefined the photographic post-production industry. It revolutionized the art of photo retouching and processing by streamlining workflows: intricate procedures which took hours or days, and could only be performed by skilled photographers, now became possible for amateur artists. Digital image manipulation has contributed greatly to the world of photography by enabling manipulations that were previously difficult or impossible, and by allowing non-destructive and easily reversible changes to images. Photoshop was responsible for many of the innovations that are now commonplace.
During the digital photography revolution of the 1990s, Photoshop became even more entrenched as the industry standard. Many photographers used the software to migrate to all-digital workflows, greatly increasing the quality of the finished image. With the rise of graphics tablets, most notably from Wacom, programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter have been used to create original pieces of art. Using the pressure sensitive tablet can improve the effects of the paint brush, eraser, or other tools. Tablets are used worldwide by professional comic book illustrators, architects, studio artists, etc. Even ILM, the special effects company that worked for the Star Wars films, used tablets combined with Photoshop in post-production.
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