Dave Stevenson
While Photoshop is the tool of choice for most creative pros, photographers may prefer Lightroom or Aperture for managing their libraries.
I was speaking on the phone to Hugh Pinney the other day. Hugh is the senior director of photography at Getty Images, and while we were talking he said something interesting. Actually, while we were talking he said quite a few interesting things, but for the purposes of this column we’ll focus on this: ‘If Photoshop didn’t exist, I don’t think we’d be playing with digital images, frankly. I think we’d be stuck with analogue.’
Which brings to mind a fascinating chicken and egg scenario. Photoshop just celebrated its 20th birthday, making it significantly older than consumer (and even most professional) digital photography. When I was 10, the nerdiest of my friends and I were dispatched to a day-long science camp to give us a day off from having our heads held in the toilet bowl. While we were there, we tinkered with one of the very earliest digital cameras, and even then we edited the results in Photoshop. It’s more comfortable to think of Photoshop’s popularity as a result of the explosion of digital photography, whereas in fact it’s entirely the opposite. The sheer mathematical power of Photoshop and the quality of the final results were what made digital photography so tempting a proposition for professional organisations and consumers alike.
The interesting thing, however, is that Photoshop is looking less relevant than ever. I can only speak from personal experience, of course, but the only time I fire it up is when I’m cropping images to go with online news stories. Occasionally, I use it to create the world’s simplest layered comps for art editors – red boxes with the words, ‘crop this’, and the like. But by and large, I stick to Adobe’s other photographic big-hitter, Lightroom.
Since the release of version 1 in 2007, Lightroom has gradually encroached on Photoshop’s territory. From its release, it was a better workflow tool than the rather clumsy combination of Bridge and Photoshop, and when version 2 of the software was released in 2008, I more or less stopped using Photoshop altogether. Adjustable brushes for dodging and burning, plus the new graduated filter masks meant that all the things I wanted to do in Photoshop were covered by Lightroom, and I didn’t need to switch between applications when I wanted to move on to another image.
Some people will argue that Photoshop offers better colour management than Lightroom, to which I offer the highly subjective rejoinder that I have prints processed entirely in Lightroom hanging on my walls. Chuck in handy-but-dull features such as decent library backup and network disk management, and it’s hardly surprising I use Photoshop less and less often.
I’m not a professional photographer, of course, and the vast majority of those who are (more than 90% in the US) still use Photoshop for one thing or another. Clearly, there’s life in the old dog yet, only now it’s fighting a battle on two fronts. Aperture has trailed Lightroom in the workflow-management arena for some time, but version 3 of Apple’s project management software is cracking. It finally gains per-pixel editing in the shape of adjustable brushes, plus a much-needed curves adjustment tool, and it can fairly claim to be ahead of Lightroom in terms of its post-production features, such as its slideshow and book-printing options. And although it would take a herd of wild bison to drag me and my 50,000-image library out of Lightroom and into an entirely new piece of software, Aperture makes perfect sense if you’ve hit the limits of what you can do in iPhoto.
So what next for Photoshop? It’s clearly more application than most photographers – including, probably, a number of professionals – need. In an improbable corruption of the saying, Photoshop is a master of all trades: the problem is that no-one else is. Few people need an application as comfortable editing reportage photos as it is creating multi-layer png icons for websites. As if that wasn’t uncomfortable enough for those who just want to take pictures, Photoshop CS4 has shoved its oar into Lightroom’s traditional strength, which is non-destructive editing. So now Lightroom offers the same workflow as the combination of Bridge and Photoshop, while Photoshop offers the non-destructive editing of Lightroom, and if your ears aren’t bleeding from the sheer effort of attempting to understand what it all means, you’re doing better than I am.
If I was forced to remove all but one of the applications from my Mac, Lightroom would be the one I’d keep. Photoshop offers a spectacular amount of power but, not being one for creating web graphics or comping pictures together, there’s a lot I don’t need. What I need, as someone prone to firing 200 exposures in an afternoon, is a tidy application that keeps everything neatly organised, can sort hundreds of images in one go, and offers world-class editing tools.
So, what next for Photoshop? I don’t think we can read too much into the fact that if it disappeared from my Mac, I wouldn’t miss it. Creative professionals love it. I used to work with an extremely talented art editor who could do things with keyboard shortcuts I couldn’t do with a mouse, the official handbook and a magic wand. You could have tried to wrestle Photoshop from him but I suspect you’d come away defeated, dishevelled and missing an earlobe.
It’s the rest of us for whom the future is really interesting. It would be interesting, for instance, to see if Lightroom continues on its Photoshop-like trajectory. Perhaps, in the version after number 3, we’ll see layer tools for blending multiple images. The number of technologies standalone photo workflow applications could borrow from fully fledged editors such as Photoshop is breathtaking, and professionals and enthusiasts alike should watch this space keenly.
This is the bit where I predict the death of Photoshop. It’s an old trick for columnists – say something bold in the hope of stirring up controversy – but I think we can all rally behind the fact that Photoshop isn’t going anywhere. In a world where computing speed doubles every two years and start-ups such as Twitter and Facebook can change the face of the Internet even faster, I find that really rather reassuring.
