Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is the industry-standard raster (pixel-based) graphics editor used for photo editing, image compositing, digital painting, and detailed visual retouching.
Definition
Adobe Photoshop is the industry-standard raster (pixel-based) graphics editor used for photo editing, image compositing, digital painting, and detailed visual retouching.
Overview
Photoshop works with images as grids of pixels, giving it fine-grained control over individual details — retouching skin, removing objects, blending multiple photos together, or painting entirely new artwork from scratch — using a layer-based editing model where each adjustment, mask, or element sits on its own independent layer. This layer system is central to non-destructive workflows, letting a designer adjust or remove any single change without affecting the rest of the image. Over decades, Photoshop expanded from pure photo retouching into a general-purpose image-editing platform used across photography, graphic design, digital art, and UI mockups, with tools for selection, masking, color correction, and compositing that have become reference points other editors are often compared against. More recently, Adobe Firefly's Generative Fill and Generative Expand features have been built directly into Photoshop, letting users extend backgrounds or remove objects using AI-generated content that blends with the surrounding image. Photoshop is typically used alongside Adobe Lightroom for volume photo organization and grading, and Adobe Illustrator for vector-based graphics, forming a core trio in professional creative workflows spanning photography, print, and digital design.
Key Features
- Pixel-based, layer-driven editing for detailed image manipulation
- Advanced selection and masking tools for precise compositing
- Generative Fill and Generative Expand powered by Adobe Firefly
- Extensive filter, effects, and color-correction toolset
- Support for digital painting with customizable brushes
- Smart Objects for non-destructive scaling and filtering
- Integration with Lightroom, Illustrator, and other Creative Cloud apps
Use Cases
History
Adobe Photoshop is the industry-standard raster image editor. It originated in 1987 as a program called "Display," written by Thomas Knoll — then a PhD student — to show grayscale images on a monochrome monitor; his brother John Knoll, working at Industrial Light & Magic, saw its potential for image editing and helped expand it. Adobe licensed the software in 1988, and Photoshop 1.0 was released on February 19, 1990, for the Macintosh. Over the following decades Photoshop became synonymous with digital image editing — its name entered common use as a verb — and it grew to include layers, non-destructive adjustments, and, more recently, AI-assisted features. It remains a cornerstone of Adobe's Creative Cloud.
Sources
- Creative Bloq — "The history of Photoshop" · as of 2026-07-17
- Adobe — Photoshop product page · as of 2026-07-17