Photoshop® CS5 Bible

Chapter 1. Introducing Adobe Photoshop CS5

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Brief introduction to Photoshop CS5

• Reasons to use Photoshop CS5

• New features introduced in Photoshop CS5

If you are reading this book, you likely have access to one of the most complicated and complex software applications available. Don't let that discourage you though. Photoshop is also a powerful and extremely fun application to use. Photoshop has throngs of fans all over the globe. Over the years, Photoshop has become the pinnacle software application for image editing. In fact, if you look up Photoshop at wiktionary.org, you find the term photoshop is actually a verb meaning "to digitally alter a picture or photograph."

Photoshop draws such a big crowd because it provides amazing results when you are editing images and yet is fairly intuitive to use such that even casual users can get pretty good results without much effort. Also, as digital imaging has advanced over the years, Photoshop has kept pace and even led the advancements in many areas.

The purpose of this chapter is to give you a brief introduction to Adobe Photoshop CS5, when to use it, and what new features have been added since CS4. Chapter 2 dives into the nuts and bolts of Photoshop's application workspace.

The Versatile World of Photoshop

The simplest description of Photoshop is "a digital image-editing application." That description doesn't come close to Photoshop's capabilities. Photoshop provides the standard color and lighting correction capabilities historically ...