What is photoshop?

Adobe Photoshop
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the current market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation, and probably the most well-known piece of software produced by Adobe Systems. It is considered the industry standard in most, if not all, jobs related to the use of visual elements. It is usually referred to simply as "Photoshop". Photoshop is currently available for Mac OS and Microsoft Windows; versions up to Photoshop 9.0 can also be used with other operating systems such as Linux using software such as CrossOver Office. Past versions of the program were ported to the SGI IRIX platform, but official support for this port was dropped after version 3.

For more information please go to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Photoshop

If you are an educator or student, there are good discounts.

It is a graphic design program that allow you to "manipulate" image and such.

Better explanation is already post at the first reply.

Here is the link for official sites and MSRP price (some seller is cheaper) :
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/

But if you are totally new and with limited budget, and want to create fun stuff without professional output, here is the option:
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelmac/index.html

I use both and sometimes the features on element is easier and you can get some result within two steps in elements while you have to do at least 4 steps to get similar result on photoshop.

Don't get me wrong, the element also have some profesional output, and powerful enough, and your imagination is the limit for both of them, but for starter and budget-wise I prefer you try element first, and you can step-up if you are more familiar, have the budget and ready to make money with photoshop.

Good Luck

You can also download a trial version of the software (not sure about Elements, but definitely Photoshop) at the Adobe website. So you can try it before you go out and spend some $$. Good luck, trust me, you'll need it.

MV

Photoshop is a very widely used graphic manipulation program for rester formats (pixels) with some support for vectors.

It's pretty easy to use, however it's not that easy to create something that looks good and it takes some practice and technique, I mean, you can't expect it to do magic (although some may argue that it does just that 😉 )

You can give The GIMP a try if you want. It's free as in freedom unlike Photoshop.