Adobe Photoshop is a pixel-based image editing program, which has, over the past several years, become a de facto standard for image processing. Pixel based means that image creation or manipulation in photoshop operates on the dots of color which, taken as a whole, make up the image itself. See topics below for a more complete discussion of pixels. The other main group of image editing programs are vector- or object-based tools, like Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand. Other image editing programs combine elements of both, such as Macromedia Fireworks.
