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What is Photoshop?
Adobe Photoshop, or simply Photoshop, is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the current market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation software.
A BITMAP is simply a digital image or photograph, made up onscreen of millions of individually coloured tiny pixels of data (or dots) that make an up an image. Therefore think of a photo or image on your computer as a digital ‘map’ of each tiny ‘bit’ of data.
A Bitmap Image - shown zoomed in with the original size in the upper right corner. Notice the individual square pixels that make up the image.
Why use Photoshop?
You would typically use Photoshop when you already have a collection of imagery available. You could then use Photoshop to edit these images for a range of different purposes, such as touching up old photos, correcting mistakes on images (such as a lens flare, or red eyes) or incorporating imagery into elements of a website or a flyer (banners, buttons, backgrounds, titles etc)
Photoshop enables you to arrange many different image elements on separate LAYERS which allows you to move things around the canvas feely, altering the composition or stacking order for effect.
You can then combine several different images into one COMPOSITE, and export this as a JPEG.
Further Photoshop Resources
About Adobe Photoshop
Background Information and Getting Started
Photoshop Interface
Keyboard Shortcuts
Tool by Tool
Adding Effects and Filters
Download
Download the full Photoshop Help File as a PDF
