Adobe Photoshop is a popular image-editing application for use in IBM compatible computers and Macintosh. It has a straightforward interface, with some extremely useful core functions. After almost a decade of its launch, it has become the most popular program of its kind.

Its origin was as a graduate school project, and started its working career in George Lucas's (Star Wars producer) Industrial Light and Magic company. Adobe purchased the software in 1990, and has gained universal popularity steadily onwards.

As an image editor, Photoshop enables you to alter photographs and other scanned artwork. You can retouch an image, apply special effects, swap details between photos, introduce text and logos, adjust color balance, and even add color to a grayscale scan. Photoshop also provides the tools you need to create images from scratch. These tools are fully compatible with pressure sensitive tablets, so you can create naturalistic images that look like watercolors and oils.

Image editors fall into the category of painting programs. In a painting program, you draw a line, and the application converts it to tiny square dots called pixels. The painting itself is called a bitmapped image. Photoshop uses the term bitmap exclusively to mean a black-and-white image, the logic being that each pixel conforms to one bit of data. The term bitmap is used more broadly to mean any image composed of a fixed number of pixels, regardless of the number of colors involved.

The strength of a painting program is it offers an extremely straightforward approach to creating images. Photoshop's core painting tools are as easy to use as a pencil. You alternately draw and erase until you reach the desired effect. The downside is that painting programs limit resolution options.

Photoshop and other painting programs are best suited to creating and editing artwork. For example: scanned photos, logos and other display type featuring reflections. Special effects that require the use of filters and color enhancements, which cannot be achieved in a drawing, program. Nearly any graphic or photograph you intend to put on the World Wide Web.

If you are inclined to create more stylized artwork, such as Posters, architectural plans, product designs, business graphics, brochures, flyers, and other single-page documents that mingle artwork, logos, and standard size text, then you are probably better off using a drawing program. Programs like CorelDRAW.