Photoshop is widely considered the best image-editing software in the world today by a long way, and it is not difficult to see why. Photoshop offers incredibly advanced effects which would previously have taken days or weeks to accomplish, and reduces them to the level of a few settings and a few 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 higher price tag has resulted in a large number of cheaper rivals (the majority of which are considered inferior) and the blatant piracy of Photoshop itself. To combat this practice, Photoshop has introduced a scaled down version of the original program known as Photoshop Elements which has been a favorite amongst beginners.

How did Photoshop get into this dominant position? Well, development started in 1987, with the first release in 1990. Since then, Adobe has been improving the software continuously, constantly taking advantage of advances in hardware power. Even now, to get the best performance out of Photoshop, you should buy as much RAM as you can afford.

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.

Due to this feature, Photoshop is many times used in the same way as Windows, in the manner of a platform. It would be a major endeavor to get these plugins to operate with any other software program, making the competition futile for those depending 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.