BACKGROUND

Art picture design history started at the beginning of human history. The simple marks  that human ancestors used to record events are the most primitive art design examples. Along with human civilization developed, people’s interest to art became the main reason of using symbols, but the initial events-recording purpose gradually desalinated. Besides artists, we all have talent in creation and we all have unique understandings of life. Painters grasp drawing skills after years of training, this is impossible to most of us. The invention of computers made ordinary people’s dreams come true.

The initial use of computers was merely on scientific computation projects. From the 50’s to the 70's, some scientists for example Noll and Knowton were engaged in research on computer graph processing by using computer programming languages. In the 70's, following the creation of PC, computers became conviennient to use. And technologies on art picture design were also mature. In the 80's, Desk Top Publishing(DTP) and Prepress made the vistual effects of computer graphics better than these of real pictures in some aspects.

HISTORY  

In 1985, Apple computer company took the lead to promote the graphical interface Macintosh series PC. In autumn 1987, in order to demonstrate pictures on Macintosh Plus machine, Thomas Knoll at Michigan university established a procedure. At first he named the procedure display. Afterwards his elder brother, John Knoll who worked on "Star War" special effects, suggested Thomas that the procedure has commercial values. John also participated in early development of photoshop software and the plug-in unit. In a product demonstration, some people suggested Thomas the software maybe called photoshop. Thomas was very satisfied with the name and retained it until now.   In summer 1988, the Knoll brothers started seeking investors in Silicon Valley. Finally they found Russell Brown, Adobe’s artistic inspector. That August, they made an oral contract, but the legal contract has been signed in next April. By that time , Adobe only had Photoshop’s "license to distribute", not the copyright. Photoshop edition 1.0.7 officially released in February 1990. In 1995, Adobe realized the importance of Photoshop and bought  Photoshop copyright from the Knoll brothers. Photoshop enjoyed huge commercial success until the 21st century, by then digital cameras had been developed and other competitors such as Phase One emerged. Thomas Knoll then took the lead in developing PS RAW (7.0) plug-in unit. Later, photoshop 8.0 officially was called CS, 9.0 was called CS2. CS (Creative Suite) software is an unified design environment.    

FUNCTION  

Photoshop’s functions include image editing, pictures systhesis, color adjustment and special effects. image editing may make each kind of transformation of pictures such as enlarge, reduce, revolve, incline, mirror, perspective and so on. Also it may make copies, remove spots, patch, decorate pictures etc. It has been used widely in portraits processing such as nuptial dress photography.Pictures systhesis is to integrate several pictures through charts level operation, this is a road to fine art design. Color adjustment is one of most powerful functions of photoshop. It may quickly adjust lightness and color arragements of pictures in order to put pictures in different domains such as homepage design, printing, multimedia and other applications in many aspects. Functions in special effects mainly consist of filters , channels and synthesis applications in photoshop. Traditional fine arts products such as oil paintings, reliefs, gypsum pictures, sketchs all can been edited by photoshop special effects. Special effect characters attracted many fine art designers.