Adobe Photoshop,is a graphic editing software created and distributed by Adobe Systems. It is the current market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation.

Features

Some of the main features in photoshop are:-

1)Files in Photoshop's native format, .PSD, can be exported to and from from other various Adobe softwares such as the Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects,Adobe ImageReady,and Adobe Encore DVD.

For example,.PSD files exported as a menu or button(from Photoshop), only needs to have layers, nested in layer sets with a comparable format, and Adobe Encore DVD would automatically reads them as buttons or menus.

2)Photoshop can read and use the color models RGB, lab, CMYK, grayscale, binary bitmap, and duotone. Photoshop has the ability to read and write raster and vector image formats such as the .EPS, .PNG, .GIF, and .JPEG formats.

3)The .PSD (Photoshop Document) format stores an image with support for most imaging options available in Photoshop such as the layers with masks,alpha channels and spot colors, Clipping paths, duotone settings color spaces, ICC profiles, transparency, and text. This is a contrast to many other file formats such as the .EPS or .GIF formats that have limited functionality and since Adobe Photoshop is a very popular, the .PSD format is widely supported among other softwares such as Corel Draw and the GIMP.

4)The .PSB,which is the Large Document Format, is a newer version of .PSD designed for files over 2 gigabytes.

5)The .PDD,PhotoDeluxe Document format is a version of .PSD that only supports the features found in the discontinued PhotoDeluxe software created by Adobe.

Languages

Adobe Photoshop CS3 is available in many other languages such Arabic (Middle Eastern version), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew (Middle Eastern version), Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, and Ukrainian.

History

In the year 1987, Thomas Knoll, then a PhD student at the University of Michigan, began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display and was named 'Display'. This program caught the attention of his brother John Knoll, an Industrial Light & Magic employee, who recommended Thomas to complete the image editing program.It took Thomas a six month break from his studies in 1988 to work together with his brother on the program, which later renamed ImagePro.After a while,it was named Photoshop

John Knoll traveled to Silicon Valley and gave a demonstration of the program to engineers at Apple Computer Inc. And in 1990,Photoshop 1.0 was released exclusively for Macintosh users.

The current (10th) iteration of the program, Photoshop CS3, was released on 16 April 2007. and is written the C++ programming language.

Paint,or often referred to as MS Paint or Microsoft Paint is a simple graphics painting program that has been included with almost all versions of Microsoft Windows since its first release.Microsoft Paint opens and saves files as Windows bitmap , JPEG, GIF images without animation or transparency, PNG images without alpha channel, and TIFF.

There is no grayscale mode is Microsoft Paint, but the program can be in color mode or two-color black-and-white,

The first version of Paint was introduced with the Windows 1.0. However,this version only supports the MSP and BMP file formats which are no longer supported by newer versions of Paint.The older versions of MS Paint cannot open or edit PNG files, and can only open normal image formats such as the GIF, JPEG, and TIFF files.

History

In Windows 95, a new version of Paint was introduced,and the same icons and color palette continued to be used until Windows XP.For Windows 98, Windows 2000 or Windows Me versions of Paint, images could be saved in JPEG and GIF formats if the correct graphic filter is installed.In Windows XP and later versions, Paint is based on GDI+ and therefore,images can be saved as JPEG, GIF, TIFF and PNG without requiring any extra graphic filters.For Windows Vista, the toolbar icons and default color palette have been changed. There is also and increased number of features such as the undo levels, a zoom slider, and a crop function.

Features

The program comes with simple options such as the Eraser/Color Eraser, Free-Form Select,Select,Fill With Colo,Pick Color, Magnifier, Pencil, Brush , Airbrush, Text, Line, Curve , Rectangle , Polygon , Ellipse and Rounded Rectangle. The Image menu offers options such as Flip/Rotate, Stretch/Skew, Invert Colors, Image Attributes, Clear Image, and Draw Opaque.

Some of the hidden functions not mentioned in the help file are a stamp mode,a strange brush, trail mode, 10x zoom, and regular shapes.

CorelDRAW is a vector graphics editor developed and commercialized by Corel Corporation.It was originally developed for Microsoft Windows and currently runs only on Windows 2000 and newer versions.. The latest version of the softwares named X4 was released in January 2008.

History

Dr. Michael Cowpland founded Corel in 1985 to sell Intel-based desktop publishing systems.In 1987, Corel hired software engineers Michel Bouillon and Pat Beirne to develop a vector-based illustration program to include them with these desktop publishing systems.The program,CorelDRAW, was released in 1989. and since the program was well received, Corel soon focused on software alone.CorelDRAW first appearance was Microsoft's release of Windows 3.1. Since the TrueType in Windows 3.1 was included,it transformed CorelDRAW into a serious illustration program capable of using system-installed outline fonts without requiring third party software such as Adobe Type Manager.

Features

Some of the tools available on CorelDRAW are :-

1)a node-edit tool that operates differently on different objects,
2)fit text-to-path,
3)stroke-before-fill,
4)quick fill/stroke color selection palettes,
5)perspective projections,
6)mesh fills and complex gradient fills.

Comparison with commercial applications

Some of the difference between CorelDRAW and its competitors is the positioning of this software as a graphics suite, rather than just a vector graphics program because of the full range of editing tools that allow the user to adjust contrast, adding special effects such as vignettes and special borders to bitmaps,color balance, and changing the format from RGB to CMYK. CorelDRAW can work with multi-page documents directly but the Adobe Illustrator only offers a single-page layout view.Plus,CorelDRAW can also open Adobe PDF files which is the Adobe PageMaker and InDesign, Microsoft Publisher.Word and PowerPoint Presentations, and able to edit every single details available on a PDF files, using Corel PhotoPaint,bitmaps can also be edited more extensively.This program also allows laser to cut out any drawings.

CorelDRAW Graphics Suit contains the following packages such as the CorelDRAW,a vector graphics editing software,Corel PHOTO-PAINT which is the raster image creation and editing software, Corel CAPTURE that enables several methods of image-capture, Corel PowerTRACE that converts raster images to vector graphics lastly and the Pixmantec RawShooter Essentials which is the support for RAW file format

Paint.NET is an open source, raster graphics editing program for Windows and was developed on the .NET Framework., Paint.NET,originally created as a Washington State University student project has evolved from a simple replacement for the Microsoft Paint program, into a powerful editor with support for layers, blending, transparency, and plugins.Paint.NET is released under the MIT License and it is a free software

History

Paint.NET originated as a computer science senior design project during spring 2004 at Washington State University. Version 1.0 consisted of 36,000 lines of code and was written in fifteen weeks.The most recent release which is version 3.20 however contains approximately 155,000 lines of code. The development of this program continues with two developers who now work at Microsoft and worked on previous versions of Paint.NET while they were students at WSU. As of May 2006 the program had been downloaded at least 2 million times, at a rate of about 180,000 per month

Paint.NET was originally created for Windows, and has no native support for any other system. In fact, as of version 3.0, support was discontinued for any Windows operating system older than Windows XP. Windows Vista support was added in the same version. With its open-source nature, however, the possibility for alternate versions is available.

Features

Paint.NET supports DLL-file plugins, which add image adjustments, effects, and support for additional file types. The plugins can be programmed using any .NET programming language, though they are most commonly written in C#. Most of the plugins are written by voluteers. For instance, a DirectDraw Surface file type plugin, and an Ink Sketch and Soften Portrait effect were added to Paint.NET in version 3.10.

Plugins

Many plugins have been produced for Paint.NET such as Shape3D, which generates a 2D drawing into a 3D shape. Some plugins expand on the functionality that comes with Paint.NET, such as Curves+ and Sharpen+. File type plugins include an Animated Cursor and Icon plugin and an Adobe Photoshop file format plugin. Many of these are based on existing open source software, such as a RAW plugin that uses dcraw and a PNG optimization plugin that uses OptiPNG.

The GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP, is a free raster graphics editor used to process digital graphics and photographs.

History

The project was started in 1995 by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis and is now maintained by a group of volunteers under the auspices of the GNU Project. The latest version of GIMP, v. 2.4.5, was released on March 1, 2008. Available under the terms of the GNU General Public License,

Uses

Some of the typical uses include

1)combining multiple images,
2)removing unwanted image features,
3)creating graphics and logos,
4)resizing and cropping photos, altering colors,
5)converting between different image formats
6)creating basic animated images in GIF format.

Features

GIMP's manipulation tools can be accessed via the toolbox, menu paths, and dialog boxes that are grouped in docks. They include filters,brushes, and transformation, selection, layer and masking tools.GIMP comes with 48 standard brushes and can be used in hard-edged, soft-edged, or eraser modes, be applied at different opacities, or used with different modes for composition.

GIMP has approximately 150 standard effects and filters, including Drop Shadow, Blur, Motion blur and Noise and it also supports gradients, which incorporate into its other tools such as brushes and fills to shade image areas . GIMP includes a variety of built-in gradients, and users can also customize and create their own gradient.

GIMP has support for layers, including transparent layers, which can be shown, hidden, or made semitransparent. It also supports transparent and semitransparent images. Channels add different types of opacity and color effects to images.

Paths painted with brushes, patterns, or various line styles can be named, saved, and it can also be used to create complex selections. GIMP can perform rectangular or circular selection, freehand selection, and "by color" selection.

Supports

GIMP can support RGB, HSV, color wheel, CMYK, and mixing modes, plus tools to pick colors from the image with various averaging options. There is also support for hexadecimal color codes (as used in HTML). However,once CMYK colours are used,it will be translated to RGB because GIMP does not have any built-in support for CMYK mixtures and colours

Comparison with commercial applications
*Paint*

GIMP is much more functional and useful than the normal Microsoft Paint found in all the Windows because MS Paint does not feature any filters or layer compatibility, and does not in any way support transparency.Paint does, however, have a level of simplicity and ease of use that GIMP does not have. GIMP and Paint use generally the same file formats,but Microsoft Paint doesn't support GIMP's native format which is the XCF (file format) or Photoshops .PSD, Paint also does not support animated GIFs.

*Photoshop*

Like Photoshop, GIMP features support for 8-bit per-channel images. There are many basic tools and filters that have identical functionality in both,such as the GIMP's Intelligent Scissors is similar to Photoshop's Magnetic Lasso tool.

1)GIMP features offer no or very weak support for plugins designed for Photoshop.Other than,GIMP plugins or scripts is not compatible with Photoshop .

2)GIMP can read and write most Photoshop native PSD format files but Photoshop does not support GIMP's native XCF file format,

3)GIMP doesnt have the extensive gamma correction support.featured in Photoshop,and it also does not support Pantone color matching system because of legal issues

4)GIMP does not support CMYK

5)GIMP does not feature special productivity features and tools such as the Adjustment layers,the history brush tool,folders in the layer window,layer styles, free transform tool

6)GIMP requires basic programming knowledge to build an automation upon it,while Photoshop can record the user's actions and repeat them with a "Play" button However,GIMP's automation is much more powerful than Photoshop

File types

1)GIMP has support for opening and saving to a large number of different file formats such as XCF, bitmap, JPEG, PNG, GIF and TIFF, Autodesk flic animations, Paintshop Pro images and Adobe Photoshop Documents.

2)Other formats include PostScript documents, X bitmap image and Zsoft PCX. GIMP can also read and write path information from SVG files.

3)GIMP can also read/write ICO Windows icon files.

4)GIMP can import Adobe PDF documents and the raw image formats used by many digital cameras, but cannot save to these formats.

GIMPshop is a modified version of the free/open source graphics program GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), designated to replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop.The primary aim of this software is to make users of Photoshop feel comfortable using GIMP

It shares GIMP's feature list, such as the manipulation tools,filters,brushes,transformation, selection, layer and masking tools.It also shares the same customisability, and availability on multiple platforms.The program's interface faces common criticisms since GIMPshop alters the menu structure to more closely resemble Photoshop.

Some of the advantages of GIMPshop over the normal GIMP software are :-

1)GIMPshop can support Photoshop plugins, through a host plugin that can run on Microsoft Windows or Linux,

2)Many tutorials for the popular Photoshop can be adapted without modification or easily with GIMPshop since the interface of the HIMPshop is similar to Photoshops.

History

GIMPshop was created by Next New Networks' (formerly Attack of the Show!'s) Scott Moschella. This program was originally developed for Mac OS X but it has been ported to Windows, Linux, and Solaris.

The only difference this program has with the normal GIMP is the background window to the user interface that sometimes causes windows to gray out or unresponsive.