Adobe Photoshop

The standard raster tool in games: UI mockups, key art, texture work, marketing assets and quick fixes.

Photoshop turns up in nearly every discipline that produces an image. Artists paint concepts and textures in it, UI designers build mockups and export sprite sheets, marketing lays out key art, store assets and social posts, and almost everyone uses it to crop, retouch or annotate a screenshot before it goes anywhere.

What a posting means by it varies. For a texture artist the relevant part is layer-based painting, masks and non-destructive adjustment; for a UI designer it is precise layout, type and export; for marketing it is templates and brand compliance across a dozen sizes.

It usually appears next to Illustrator for vector work, Substance for material authoring, and motion graphics tools for animated assets. Named on its own the skill says little, which is why postings that rely on it ask for a portfolio showing which part of the tool the work actually needed.