-Harinder Salwan
Every company, while sitting for an annual review meeting will think of what their competitors will be doing. However, the board of Adobe’s Photoshop need not worry on that.
With the sole bread winner of the family of image-editing industry, Photoshop turns 25. With no knowledge about the software among the techies, today this image editor has become a part of the life of even a common man. An individual from any walks of life, in any given day, cannot kiss his pillows without coming across Photoshop in one form or other.
Today Photoshop is cross platform, and over the years and developed the most intuitive user interface and has the most complete set of tools and you will be surprised to know that it also has the largest number of reference books around.
Well, like any image-editing program, you can use Photoshop to “alter” images like photos, downloaded icons, or scanned artwork. Altering an image includes doing such things as changing the colors within an image, modifying the size and scale of an image, or putting one picture “within” another.
Alteration also includes technical modifications such as changing the mode of image compression from one type to another, or changing the number of bits used per pixel.But, aside from altering images, Photoshop has a vast array of tools that help you “create” images from scratch.On the web, you will often need to make custom icons, buttons, lines, balls or text art. Photoshop makes all of this excessively easy and fun.
The number of photoshop licenses that Adobe has sold far exceed those of all its competitors (something like a Maruti car in the Indian Market sells half of the cars made out of 20 odd players in the market).
Over the years Photoshop was selling around USD 700 for a perpetual license which translates to approx. Rs. 40000 and with the transition to cloud this is now available around Rs. 18000 per year to a corporate customer and the biggest beneficiary is the individual who can now buy online at a ridiculous price of Rs. 6000 a year.
Also it is observed that Photoshop is the most widely pirated product of Adobe across the globe for the simple reason as it is considered as a Bible for Photo editing and the closest competition is miles away today.
I am happy to see a Photoshop from a crawling child to a naughty adult to a matured man !
(The author is a long-time partner of Adobe and MD of Tricom multimedia. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views of Channel Times or any of the websites managed or operated by Trivone Digital Services)