I fully understand that even uttering those words is an act of heresy. The only thing that matches the loyalty of the mac community is the loyalty of the Photoshop fan base. But this is not going to be an exercise in Photoshop bashing. I love Photoshop. I think it is a superb application that has served the design and photographic industries incredibly well. Aside from a few minor issues there is nothing whatsoever bad about Photoshop. Thousands of people rely on it every day for their living, myself included. Photoshop has no equal. And that’s precisely where the problem lies.
Photoshop has become stagnated in its throne at the top of the world of image editing. Without competition it churns along, adding innovative features with each new release, but hardly anything earth shattering. Its interface remains pretty much the same as it always has, and well it should. Photoshop, like Microsoft Office is one of those applications that are absolutely crucial to the Mac market, and as such no one dares challenge it. And frankly, no one outside of Apple probably has the resources to. Adobe steers the image processing market pretty much any way it wants to and everyone else has to follow. They do not just lead the market – they are the market. In the times we live in, applications are changing, platforms are changing and behemoth programs like Office and Photoshop are torn between modernising and changing or alienating all their customers. Sure they can add new features, but they are beholden to their customer base and platform choice.
For me, the two biggest issues with Photoshop are also its greatest accomplishments. It’s been around for years and it’s cross platform.
Most people would consider “cross platform” an essential pre-requisite of any piece of professional software, but how much is been held back in order to maintain platform parity? It’s ironic that in the past Mac users have been screaming just to get parity with the windows versions of software, but OSX has moved so far now that the opposite is now the case. While the average user considers the operating system to be the look and feel of the windows, the finder and dashboard etc – generally how you interact with your computer, the fact is there are a wealth of technologies that are under the hood that differentiate windows from the Mac OS. Windows has DirectX and Windows Media; Apple has Core Image, Core Video, Core Audio and a wealth of others. The technology literate (i.e. geeks) may have heard of “core image” and “core data” but the average person probably has no idea what they are.
Unfortunately, in the high-end application space, the only one really taking advantage of these technologies is Apple. Take a look at Motion for example. Motion is a fantastic piece of software whose real time performance has yet to be matched by any other developer on any platform. It’s a unique piece of software and yet the underlying technology behind motion, namely core video is built right into OSX. The problem for third party developers is that they need to make their Applications cross platform in order to guarantee sales, at least the bigger developers do, and so technologies like core video are ignored because they are Mac only.
Apple takes a lot of heat every time it releases a new professional application, because of it’s perceived threat to third party developers, but in many cases with Apple software, there was a market dominated by one player, with little or no competition, in the space they entered, and certainly not pushing the boundaries of what the platform could do. Not to sound too corny, but in many cases a particular market needed some different thinking, like what they did for editing with Final Cut Pro. No one else will dare make a mac only application at the high end level, and some people still think that in key software markets, Apple has no business competing. Yet, sometimes that different approach really is needed. Take a step back for a second and look at Aperture and Lightroom. They are two similar Applications that do similar things but in very different ways. Both have their merits, and more importantly, development of one keeps the development team of the other on its toes. The pace of development of both of these applications shows what can happen when two heavyweights of the software industry duke it out. And this time it’s Adobe entering Apple’s space. (Although they undoubtedly feel that they own anything to do with digital photography)
Which brings us back to Photoshop. Photoshop has been a cross platform application for quite some time so there’s no way they are ever going to make a mac only version, and apart from some applescript support, don’t expect to see mac only features either. We will never see a core image based Photoshop or even something as simple as support for OSX’s built in font management (Please Adobe prove me wrong on this one). Feature parity really is a double-edged sword for mac applications, but it’s a little unfair to single out Photoshop, as most cross platform developers are the same. You can’t really fault Adobe either, it the market position they are in. Unfortunately it’s just the nature of the beast as it were.
The second problem, the one of its long lifespan, is not so much what Photoshop is, but rather what it could be if they were to start again. It’s a pretty impressive feat for an application to have been around as long as Photoshop has. But, on the other hand, Photoshop’s legacy pretty much means that Adobe can’t really do anything radical with the software without alienating their existing users. And there is so much potential for a modern powerful photo editing application to do things differently than Photoshop. Imagine a non-destructive core image based image editor? Sure there are a few shareware programs (and some of those are pretty innovative), but no professional tools with the Power of Photoshop. Imagine a completely different user interface based on modern GUI concepts, without floating pallets everywhere, dockable or otherwise. Imagine GPU based effects and transforms or even a node-based metaphor like Shake. None of these ideas are particularly Photoshop, and so long as no one competes with them they never will be.
I have been using Photoshop for as long as I can remember. I like that I can use the Application for my work without even thinking. But I would also like to be challenged once in a while. Photoshop feels like an old comfortable pair of shoes, and eventually you want to try out new shoes to see what they feel like. As I said at the start, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with Photoshop, it’s just that no one dares to imagine anything different, and at the end of the day, it’s difference that drives innovation and evolution.
Resources and Reference
Wikipedia Article on Photoshop (check out the logos of previous versions)
Apple Aperture
Photoshop Lightroom
Apple Developer Information on Graphics and Imaging
Core Image Information (for mere mortals)
Some Interesting Alternative Imaging Software
The Gimp (open source image editor – similar look and feel to Photoshop. Requires X Windows, but free)
Imaginator (Core Image based editing software – more of a technology demonstrator than anything useful)
LightZone (A completely different approach to colour and tone correction)
PhotoComplete (A Pretty basic Editor, but slick interface, non destructive editing and fast)
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photoshop did have a competitor in the form of Live Picture, but that app was badly marketed and once John Scully got his hands on it he really drove it into the ground, LP was a brilliant app and to this day it still has features that have yet to show up in photoshop…
I for one, as a longtime Adobe adopter on the Mac, am miffed at Adobe for dragging their feet on updating the Creative Suite lineage. Upon the release of OS X, Apple has been creating and updating essential core elements for quite some time now and all along Adobe should be utilizing those features. They simply need to be updating the Mac versions of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign and release Mac versions accordingly and let the Windows versions fall as they may.
At this point I am all for seeing a Photoshop competitor-developer who is willing to stay abreast of Apple’s technologies and release versions implementing those capabilities. Adobe’s blatant willingness to release Photoshop based on where the money is (Microsoft OS) will eventually come back to haunt them.
I agree that it would be great if Adobe gave more attention to utilizing Apple technologies, like Core Image. Apple could design a far superior image editor, but that is unlikely to happen soon. We can hope that Adobe covers more ground with the CS3 update, but I doubt that Photoshop will receive a major overhaul of the type suggested in this excellent article. As a digital artist, I use Photoshop every day and feel that the interface is positively dinosauric by today’s standards. Why continue to do things the same old way, simply because that is the way we have always done them? I want non-destructive image editing, better control of the filters (Example: Radial Blur cannot be precisely placed), and more intuitive layout and functioning of the controls. We should be able to Crop while retaining proportionate image dimensions, for example. We shouldn’t have to hunt through the menus to get things done. Make things visually obvious, for a hands-on feel.