[bitL]

Photoshop will be eaten by generative AI in the next few years. Lightroom is still the best, Illustrator is in a duopoly with CorelDRAW. I used to be a pro photo/cinematographer and I can replace most of my Photoshop needs with stable diffusion + ControlNet + ClipSeg. DaVinci with plugins made After Effect irrelevant for my needs as well. Certainly Adobe still has momentum but their future after they switched from engineering/art company to rentier monopoly company doesn't look that rosy.

[danaris]

> Photoshop will be eaten by generative AI in the next few years.

This is a laughable idea.

Even if professional artists want to use generative AI in their workflow, it won't be by replacing a tool like Photoshop. It will be by enhancing it.

And if you think the entire art profession will be "eaten by generative AI", then you clearly know very little about human nature.

People will always want to create art. People will always want to see and own art.

Even if some of that latter desire is satisfied by generative AI in the future, I guarantee you not all of it will be. For one thing, there will also always be people who feel that the human touch is more important—that AI art isn't "real" art—and thus, in a world where AI-generated art is ubiquitous, human-created art will become even more prized.

[bitL]

You are missing the point. It's fairly easy to replace Photoshop's layering, color correction, filters etc. by a regular software engineering. Where Adobe had extra edge was their retouching, masking and content filling ability. That is now going to be possible to incorporate anywhere by stable diffusion et al. Now Adobe will still have foothold in "legacy" projects with proprietary formats but all the new entrants will have no need to use it. Suddenly folks in Affinity/Serif can add those missing features and continue carving out more from Adobe's market share the way Japan went from crappy manufacturing in the 60s to bleeding edge tech in 80s.

[danaris]

I mean, this is a very different version of "being eaten by generative AI" than what it sounded like you meant. This sounds much more like "Adobe will lose their moat and be outcompeted by other art programs (because generative AI is becoming ubiquitous)".

There are a lot of people out there saying things like "soon there won't be any more programmers/artists/writers because we'll be able to get generative AI to do all that stuff" (with, often, an implication of "screw those lazy/hippie art kids" from those talking about the latter two). This is very much what it sounded like you were saying.

[bitL]

Sorry, the message was probably obfuscated in my original post. I didn't mean that generative AI would replace art producers, just individual tools and it didn't occur to me at the time of typing it that most people would associate it with replacing art producers (as the tooling aspect was "obvious" to me).

[chefandy]

I've been in-and-out of every one of these stacks professionally for years. I was a professional graphic and interface designer for a decade, which involved photography, photo editing, motion graphics and other 2d animation, and digital illustration. I've done a bit of freelancing, specfically with branding, identity and print design, but it's mostly been full-time, in-house work. More recently, I have moved into 3D modeling, 3D animation, and game engine work. I've worked with the current generative tools in professional settings and did procedural art and design work long before the current fad. I've seen their progression, and know better than damn near anyone you'll meet where they stand in the commercial art world.

You're basing unsubstantiated predictions on top of assumptions to form dubious suppositions about the future of these things to change the topic from your patently absurd assertion that the largest player in most creative industries became "irrelevant," "years ago." You're clearly going to continue pretending personal preferences, based on an incredibly narrow slice experience in this huge collection of creative industries, is generalizable to the rest of it. I'd say there's about zero percent chance you're going to start engaging in this conversation in good faith, so I'll let you finish it by yourself: you don't need my help to try and convince yourself that you know what you're talking about.

[bitL]

My business background tells me Adobe Photoshop is going to be commoditized because their main advantage in retouching, content filling and masking can be now done by any 10-year old with a beefier GPU at the same or better quality. Even ridiculously bad GIMP can now get the same state-of-art tools Adobe has so inevitably its value proposition will be only appealing to existing "legacy" customers and dropping everywhere else.

[chefandy]

* Edit: it was a different person that posted the initial absurd statement. I'm leaving my response in here but italicizing it.

To be clear, the statement you're defending is that Adobe became "irrelevant" "years ago" which you backed up by comparing Premier to DaVinci Resolve. To be clear about the conversation you've switched to so you don't have to keep addressing that ridiculous statement:

if you think that anybody with stable diffusion or even the paid options can even approach the quality or efficiency of someone using Photoshop with its current set of tools based on the same technology, but targeted for specific professional tasks you really, really, really don't know what you're talking about. If your business background puts you in a business position leading you to any business decisions that have business consequences about this business then you better get busy hiring a consultant with more up-to-date knowledge.

* Edit: > 'I'll let you finish it by yourself'

I guess I lied.

[bitL]

Thanks for ad hominem. I never said 'Adobe became "irrelevant" "years ago"'. I also didn't say anyone can replace Adobe easily, but outlined a path how a motivated company can replace their offering. If somebody offers better UX (and there are many options to do better than PS), lowering the switching costs in required training, then it can happen fairly quickly. Beside being a former pro photo/cinematographer, I also worked for one Adobe competitor and invented a bunch of new geometric and image processing algorithms, then went on to study Deep Learning at Stanford, so maybe I know what I am talking about, or maybe I am just a fallacious idiot who has no clue.

[chefandy]

> Thanks for ad hominem.

Good grief. I mistook you for the person who made the initial absurd statement because you responded to the comment for which I responded to them. Who would deliberately misquote someone that can fact checked by moving their eyes 4 inches up the screen?

>I also didn't say anyone can replace Adobe easily, but outlined a path how a motivated company can replace their offering.

Ok, let's take a look.

"their main advantage in retouching, content filling and masking can be now done by any 10-year old with a beefier GPU at the same or better quality. Even ridiculously bad GIMP can now get the same state-of-art tools Adobe has..."

a) False. b) Sure sounds like you're saying that a 10 year old or Gimp can replace Photoshop functionality easily. Pretty precise word slicing there, but ok.

> so inevitably its value proposition will be only appealing to existing "legacy" customers and dropping everywhere else.

So... their fading into irrelevance as a legacy product isn't being "easily replaced?" Yeah, ok.

> If somebody offers better UX (and there are many options to do better than PS), lowering the switching costs in required training, then it can happen fairly quickly.

The entire format of the generative AI tools is designed for amateurs to make "gee whiz" images without needing any discernible useful skills but the interface fundamentally abstracts away the repeatability and specificity needed for professional communication work. Meanwhile, Adobe started rolling out generative neural network based tools specifically targeted to professional use cases 3 or 4 years ago. Things might change, but this is not a close competition right now, and won't likely be for the foreseeable future. If you see Photoshop as a static target, you simply don't have current knowledge of the space.

> Beside being a former pro photo/cinematographer, I also worked for one Adobe competitor and invented a bunch of new geometric and image processing algorithms, then went on to study Deep Learning at Stanford, so maybe I know what I am talking about, or maybe I am just a fallacious idiot who doesn't get it.

Well, it sure sounds like you don't know much about the current state of the image manipulation tools I work with on a daily basis, which is what the conversation is about. You could be the former CEO of Adobe with a PhD in ML concentrating in image generation and a wing dedicated to your artwork at the Met and still be too out of touch with current image manipulation tooling to make useful predictions about it. In fact, I'd say nearly everybody I've encountered that's really into AI image generation and says it'll soon best the current professional toolkit couldn't list 5 significant ways Photoshop has changed in the past 10 years. And Photoshop is the most vulnerable too in their kit, by far. The prospect of it replacing InDesign anytime soon is absolutely laughable.

[bitL]

> You could be the former CEO of Adobe with a PhD in ML concentrating in image generation and a wing dedicated to your artwork at the Met and still be too out of touch with current image manipulation tooling to make useful predictions about it.

This was a good one, I love it!

My SWengineering background tells me that many of the tools Adobe has are tedious to replace but doable by many algorithmically gifted folks. Some need some investment to get to pro level like color calibration and correction. Some need camera manufacturer support like initial sensor RAW processing. The ones that were causing awe like their famous patented content aware fill based on complicated differential equations was out of reach for most. So were their precise selection/masking tools and a few more. Now we suddenly can select objects/background/hair fairly easily and reliably using ClipSeg or Segment Anything, removing the masking obstacle. To fill/replace content, we simply select the area and let stable diffusion hallucinate options until we are happy. To simulate puppet tool, we can use ControlNet with stable diffusion though implementing ARAP is also fairly easy. So a dedicated company that wants to get to the parity with Adobe in their most advanced tooling suddenly has a clear road ahead. If they improve UX by e.g. voice or gesture control (plenty of places where Adobe tools are difficult to use for no reason) and do some decent image format compatibility, they can really make a dent in Adobe's market share.

This might sound self-aggrandizing, but given infinite time and energy I alone could replicate most of the CS6 functionality of PS at the same or better quality (and I did create some powerful tools for one of their competitors) and know a few folks capable of the same.