Photoshop

Adobe’s Photoshop is a computer software program for graphics editing. It has become the industry standard in its category. Available for both Macintosh and Windows computers, it was first released in 1990 and has remained one of Adobe’s strongest-selling and most iconic products through many updates.

Photoshop has acquired cultural significance because its photo editing tools provide users with an essentially unlimited capacity for digitally retouching photographs. It is often used, for example, to improve the appearance of people in public images, especially celebrities. It can also be used to doctor photographic evidence and thus commit deception and fraud.

Because it is the industry standard and because its cultural significance has made it familiar to the general public, Photoshop has been informally turned into a verb, as in “He doesn’t really look that good — he’s been photoshopped.”