1. Introduction to Photoshop, Strengths and Weaknesses.

Adobe Photoshop was originally published in 1990 as a way to edit, improve, and retouch digital photographs. As Photoshop grew and improved, it also became a popular way to create digital paintings, as well as web graphics and animations. Adobe Photoshop has transformed the commercial art and publishing industries, with many features that make it exceptional.

Key Features:

1. In Photoshop, you can create new image files, starting with a blank canvas, and adding digital paint, texture, collages. There are endless ways to manipulate images.

2. Photoshop allows you to save your work in many different file formats, such as GIFs, JPGs, PNGs, TIFFs, and PSD documents - meaning Photoshop Document.

3. Photoshop allows you to create different layers in a working document, so that you can manipulate one layer without changing (or ruining) the others.

4. Photoshop allows you to open RAW files (the best quality picture photos your camera can make). Opening a RAW file automatically starts an extension called Camera RAW, where you can edit the image before using traditional Photoshop.

5. You can add a variety of text to your images, great for posters, brochures, etc.

6. You can change the size of your image, for printing on various size paper.

7. One of the most popular functions available is the Undo button. You can find it under EDIT in the toolbar above, or simply press CTRL-Z. This allows you to quickly undo any mistakes you make.

8. One of the latest additions to Photoshop is Generative Fill. If there is a detail or spot in your artwork that you wish to remove, you need only draw a lasso mask around it, and press FILL (in the EDIT toolbar above). Photoshop will use artificial intelligence to delete the spot, and fill it with what it thinks will best fit that spot, based on the colors, shapes, and textures around it. Generative Fill can create almost anything - skin textures, leaves, grass, sky, clouds. It's so seamless, you can print the image and not notice any evidence of the change. Before Generative Fill, artists mostly used the Airbrush to cover over blemishes, occasionally making people appear plastic, like dolls.

Weaknesses of Photoshop

The main weakness of Photoshop, which has driven countless artists and photographers crazy, is that, if you're not careful, you could damage or lose your artwork, by accidentally saving one file over another. When you hit SAVE, you are rewriting whatever you had made before - the previous file is now gone. In Photoshop, you will see SAVE as an option right next to SAVE AS. Be very careful to always hit SAVE AS, which allows you to rename the file, creating a new file while preserving the previous one.

So, for example, let's say you have a big, beautiful JPEG, full of detail, and you want to make a smaller version for the internet. You change the image size, from 6000 to 1200 pixels wide. Then, you accidentally hit SAVE, instead of SAVE AS. Your original image is now gone, and all you have left is the tiny version that you can't zoom in on, or print with the same quality. If this happens - don't despair, and don't close the program! Simply hit UNDO until your image is large again, and resave it!

Another issue with saving - hitting SAVE AS also allows you to determine the quality and size (in megabytes) of the file you are creating - a window will pop up before the saving takes place. When you hit SAVE, the program often overwrites without asking you what quality size you wanted.

So, basically, never hit SAVE in Photoshop!

The Cost

The second major drawback of Photoshop is its cost. Photoshop was always expensive. The first version cost $895, and that was back in 1990! To be fair, before the introduction of Photoshop, people would charge you $300 an hour to retouch your photos digitally for you. And, Adobe allowed student and teacher discounts. Since the establishment of Adobe's Creative Cloud, Photoshop is no longer available for purchase. You subscribe to it. This means you get good customer support and all the latest updates automatically - but you must pay between $20-$35 a month - for the rest of your life. It's a large expense.

It's Not Lightroom

Apart from this, there are several features that Photoshop doesn't have, which were instead created in Lightroom. And as Lightroom has now supplanted Photoshop as the most popular photo editing software, and both are available under the same Adobe Creative Suite, it seems unlikely that Photoshop will ever gain them - things like editing multiple images at once, adding hashtags, etc.