Philip B. Corbett, the NYTimes deputy news editor, is also in charge of The Times’s style manual. Says he:
The folks at Adobe Systems Inc. remind us that “Photoshop” is a registered trademark referring to Adobe’s “digital imaging software products and related services.” It is not, they note, a generic term, and should not be used as a verb to describe the general process of digitally manipulating photographs.
As usual in these cases, their proposed alternatives — for instance, “editing with Photoshop software” or “morphing with Photoshop software” — are a bit unwieldy. And The Times’s stylebook doesn’t insist on using trademarks only as modifiers, if that clashes with idiom (we wouldn’t refer to a 7Up brand soft drink, for example). But trademarks should be uppercase, and we should generally avoid using them as verbs.
Photo credit: bmack303‘s “Ford Galaxy” from the Worth 1000 Redneck Space Race 2 Photoshop contest. Enter the Redneck Space Race 3 contest today. Contest ends Sunday. See also, the first Redneck Space Race gallery.