OP ED 52

The Future Of Photoshop

Our weekly editorial from OP's editors, columnists and contributors

As the Lightroom 2.0 Public Beta gets into full swing, it’s possible we’re looking at the beginning of a life without Photoshop. Well, maybe that’s a bit over the top. It’s not so much a life without Photoshop as a life when many photographers don’t have to start up Photoshop as soon as they want to work on their photographs.

The quest for a Photoshop killer has been bandied about for a long time, but we’ve always questioned whether or not that venerable and incredibly powerful program needed to be killed. The simple fact is that Photoshop can do just about anything you could ever want in an imagery program. Why should it be killed?

For many photographers, Photoshop represents the overindulgence of the late days of the Roman Empire. Bloated by the spoils of conquests and overextended to the point where it could no longer serve the needs of many of its citizens, the Empire had lost focus and ultimately fell. Okay, it’s not a perfect analogy because Photoshop still is a relevant and incredibly useful product, but it’s bloated and it’s complex, and many photographers have neither the time nor the inclination to learn to use the capability within the program.

When Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom first came out, there were whisperings about the end of Photoshop, but those whispers were quickly silenced when it became clear that both Aperture and Lightroom were geared to playing the middle man in a comprehensive workflow that covered capture to output.

Now, as Aperture 2.0 is accepting plug-ins and Lightroom looks to be  doing the same, these middle-management players are making their charges to be much more useful programs for every photographer. I don’t think Photoshop is going to be killed, at least not yet, but it’s clear that photographers won’t be automatically clicking on the Ps icon anytime they want to be working on an image. For many of us, the increased capabilities of Aperture or Lightroom with plug-ins will delay us from launching Photoshop to finish an image and, in many cases, we won’t have to launch Photoshop at all.

Photoshop still will be relevant, and it will still be a program that we all have on our systems. It just won’t be the only program we need to use for image adjustment and output.

The Editors

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