While Photoshop is widely used in artistic and creative imaging, it also contains a powerful suite of tools for image processing in arbitrary color spaces. I'm

While Photoshop is widely used in artistic and creative imaging, it also contains a powerful suite of tools for image processing in arbitrary color spaces. I'm not even a serious user and across various hobby projects I've used it for stuff like manipulating 3D depth data and deriving logical bit masks. Photoshop can do just about anything with spatial image data and if it's not built-in, you can probably find a plug-in to do what you want or write a script. The trade-off is the software can be very complex because over the decades it's grown to support an incredible number of use cases. Over the years I've also seen PS used in unexpected ways at work. If you need to do something programmatic to image or spatial data, PS is a good host platform for custom code because it will handle importing file formats, color space conversion, bit plane manipulation, alignment, scaling, cropping, perspective correction and masking before your custom processing and then it'll export the output in whatever sizes and formats you need. And it will do it on gigapixel data sets under script control. That's a lot of grunt work you don't have to implement. I've even seen it wired up to Matlab.