In my opion Adobe Photoshop.
Adobe Photoshop, or simply Photoshop, is a graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the current market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation, and, in addition to Adobe Acrobat, is one of the best-known pieces of software produced by Adobe Systems. It is considered the industry standard in most jobs related to the use of visual elements. Photoshop is available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Mac OS; 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 and Sun Solaris platforms, but official support for this port was dropped after version 3.
Features
Simple composite image produced with various tools in Photoshop.
Original image
Background image
Images combined using PhotoshopAlthough primarily designed to edit images for paper-based printing, Photoshop is used increasingly to produce images for the World Wide Web. Recent versions bundle a related application, Adobe ImageReady, to provide a more specialized set of tools for this purpose.
Photoshop also has strong ties with other Adobe software for media editing, animation and authoring. Files in Photoshop's native format, .PSD, can be exported to and from Adobe ImageReady, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere, After Effects and Adobe Encore DVD to make professional standard DVDs, provide non-linear editing and special effects services such as backgrounds, textures and so on for television, film and the Web. For example, Photoshop CS broadly supports making menus and buttons for DVDs. For .PSD files exported as a menu or button, it only needs to have layers, nested in layer sets with a cueing format and Adobe Encore DVD reads them as buttons or menus.
Photoshop can deal with a number of different color models:
RGB color model
Lab color model
CMYK color model
Grayscale
Bitmap
Duotone
The most recent major version, released in 2005, is version 9. This iteration of the program is marketed as "Photoshop CS2." "CS" reflects its integration with "Adobe's Creative Suite" and a number "2" because it is the second version released since Adobe rebranded their products under the CS umbrella. Photoshop CS2 features important new additions such as multiple layer selecting and "warp," a curve-friendly version of the transform tool as well as a colour replacement tool, which was only previously available as a plug-in. For the digital photography enthusiasts, the "reduce grain" filter can help to improve pictures taken in low light. In an effort to break away from previous versions of the application and to reinforce its belonging with the new line of products, Photoshop even dropped one classic graphic feature from its packaging: the Photoshop eye icon, which was present in different manifestations from versions 3 to 7. Photoshop CS and CS2 now use feather icons as a form of identification.
Camera RAW 3.xThe latest version comes with Adobe Camera RAW, a plugin developed by Thomas Knoll which can read several RAW file formats from various digital cameras and import them directly into Photoshop. A preliminary version of the RAW plugin was also available for Photoshop 7.0.1 as a $99 USD optional purchase.
While Photoshop is the industry standard image editing program for professional raster graphics, its relatively high suggested retail price (US $600, approximately) has led to a number of competing graphics tools being made available at lower prices. To compete in this market, and to counter unusually high rates of piracy of their professional products, Adobe has introduced a Photoshop Elements, a version of Photoshop with many professional features removed, for under $100 US; this is aimed firmly at the general consumer market since the feature cuts make it less desirable for prepress work.
File formats
Photoshop has the ability to read and write many common raster and vector image formats such as .png, .gif, .jpeg, etc. It also has several native file formats:
The PSD (Photoshop Document) format stores an image as a set of layers, including text, masks, opacity, blend modes, color channels, alpha channels, clipping paths, and duotone settings. Photoshop's popularity means that the PSD format is widely used, and it is supported to some extent by most competing software.
The PSB format is a newer version of PSD designed for files over 2 GB.
The PDD format is a version of PSD that only supports the features found in the discontinued PhotoDeluxe software.