Alongside Photoshop, Adobe also develops and publishes Photoshop Elements, Photoshop Lightroom, Photoshop Express and Photoshop Touch. Collectively, they are branded as The Adobe Photoshop Family. It is currently a licensed software.
Photoshop was created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, it has become the de facto industry standard in raster graphics editing, such that the word photoshop has become a verb as in to Photoshop an image, photo shopping, and photoshop contest, etc. It can edit and compose raster images in multiple layers and supports masks, alpha compositing and several color models including RGB, CMYK, Lab color space, spot color and duotone. Photoshop has vast support for graphic file formats but also uses its own PSD and PSB file formats which support all the aforementioned features. In addition to raster graphics, it has limited abilities to edit or render text, vector graphics , 3D graphics and video. Photoshops featureset can be expanded by Photoshop plug-ins, programs developed and distributed independently of Photoshop that can run inside it and offer new or enhanced features. (source :
wikipedia)