A woman sits at her desk typing up a report for her meeting the next day. A young boy sits at his computer playing dated Super Nintendo ROMs on an illegal Super Nintendo simulator. A middle-aged man does his taxes using a program he recently purchased over the internet. A college student uses an interactive online rating system to determine which airline would be best to travel home for Spring Break. What do all these people have in common? Though their actions are all very different, they are all being accomplished using the same type of mechanism: a software agent.

A software agent is defined as many things: from an anthropomorphic servant, to a companion in cyberspace, to an entire interface. Because of the agents' function as a sort of 'middle-man' between the user and his creation, some contend that software agents are limiting the user's imagination of what is possible to do with a computer by only allowing him certain tasks within the agent program. However, although many software agents do restrict users to the functions contained within their own capabilities, this is not true of all programs. Adobe's Photoshop program for image editing provides the user with such an ample array of filters, tools, and plug-ins that virtually any visual conception can be realized.

The Photoshop program has been undergoing nearly constant reconstruction since its days of digital infancy in 1989. What started as a graphics program designed and used in the creation of the movie Abyss was quickly bought by the Adobe software company and refined into what is now credited to 2/3 of all images on the internet. With each major update, the engineers at Adobe strive to make the program more effective by adding more tools and updating old methods. For example, Adobe recently released version 5.5, a significant improvement on version 5.0 in that it contains a number of applications targeted at webmasters and web designers. Version 5.0, in contrast, was more widely accepted than its predecessor the 4.0 series, because it came equipped with a history palette, allowing the user to make multiple undos, whereas the 4.0 series limited the user to only undoing one step previous. With the advent of version 5.5 and its added surplus of web-applications (sRGB color palette, anti-alias option for small fonts, and the inclusion of ImageReady2.0, a program which, among other things, includes the capability for gif animation and image-mapping), Photoshop has been heralded as the definitive tool for web and graphic design world-wide.

Virtually all Photoshop users agree that the program's strength lies in the immense amount of filters and effects contained in its libraries. Whereas many image editing programs such as Corel's PhotoHouse program contain only the bare essentials: crop, resize, lighten, darken, and so on, Adobe's Photoshop sports over 200 ways to edit a digital image, from the basic essentials mentioned previously to a more advanced array of filters, masks, and layering systems that, when used in tandem, can produce a nearly endless supply of vastly different effects.

If Photoshop's one-hundred-odd filters and endless combinations aren't enough, the internet community sports quite a number of non-Adobe plug-ins to increase Photoshop's capabilities. Eye Candy from Alien Skin Software, one of the better known add-ons, includes a variety of new filters, including 'fur', 'glass', 'antimatter', 'waterdrops', and a plethora of other oddly-named effects. Kai's Power Tools, another well-known add-on from MetaCreations, brings with it some even more unorthodox names; among them 'Blurrr...', 'RadWarp', 'Noize', and others. To date, there are well over 50 programs which can be used to add to the Adobe Photoshop program, creating a total database of over 300 filters.

As for Photoshop's effect on the creativity of its users, there seem to be mixed reactions. While all persons interviewed for this paper agreed that Photoshop did not restrain them from coming up with ideas, a number of them complained that they were unable to follow through with certain ideas because they did not know how to get a certain effect on Photoshop and did not want to search through the seemingly endless list of filters and plug-ins. While many of those interviewed stated that they did indeed tend to create images based on their knowledge of Photoshop's capabilities, they also stated that they did not feel hindered by the program itself. Rather, they felt that they were being held back by their own lack of familiarity with the multitude of tools offered by the program. When one subject was asked if she had ever been unable to accomplish a desired effect on Photoshop, she answered: "[I] don't think so. So far, everything I wanted to do, I've been able to ... mind you, I don't know all [its] capability yet" (Ying, chatlog #2). All those interviewed agreed that Adobe's Photoshop program was not user-friendly, and required a great deal of time and effort to be understood and used to its full potential.

From the interviews conducted, there seem to be two main groups of Photoshop users; those who consider themselves creative enough to use Photoshop only as a tool for expressing their pre-conceived concepts, and those who use Photoshop as a sort of crutch or helper in coming up with ideas. From this, there is no evidence that Photoshop limits its users to ideas only conceivable within the program's limitations; in fact, this idea is directly contradicted within more than one of the interviews conducted.

From these findings, Photoshop seems to be an extremely versatile tool in image editing, however requires a great deal of effort from the user to be used properly. Those familiar with the program should be able to achieve, using the numerous plug-ins available, virtually any visual concept. While those unfamiliar with the program may experience more difficulty, the program itself cannot be blamed for the limited knowledge of its users, especially in light of the numerous plug-ins and add-ons available. With time and practice, the Photoshop program has the potential to become an invaluable tool in creating digital imagery.