"I love and hate Adobe," he said when we first discussed this piece. See, Adobe doesn't build Photoshop for my dad. Adobe just builds Photoshop, and Photoshop is an insane mess. Every couple years brings a new version, costing hundreds of dollars, chock full of new features he doesn't need, and lacking the improvements he wants. Later, he downgraded his original sentiment: "I hate Adobe."
That surprised me, and not just because I've never heard my dad admit to hating anything. But I think I know how he feels, because I have my own love-hate relationship. It's called New York City. A city of too-small, too-expensive apartments, built in some antediluvian past, tunneled under with subways — elaborate rat-delivery mechanisms — and yet there are never enough trains, and the fare hikes are egregious, and it's so gross and hot down there in the summer, and nobody seems to know what to do about the homeless people huddled there in the winter.
And in a way, that’s Photoshop. It's like a world-class city — New York or London or Paris — centuries-old and layered thick with the past. They serve people, and people serve them, today’s denizens merely building upon what came before them. Cities grow and change organically as people find new uses for them. Sometimes they sprawl like kudzu (Houston, Los Angeles); sometimes they wither and shrink (Detroit).
Photoshop has grown and changed over the last two decades, becoming something new and unexpected. That’s great: it means new functionality and (in theory) better performance. But if, like my dad, you’ve been using the app from the beginning, when it was a tiny village that did one thing and did it well, you might be suspicious of all this change. Or at least wonder what it’s good for. Photoshop today seems basically feature complete, and totally unassailable. It's more than just the best professional image editing app: it's kind of the only professional image editing app. It’s the city that, to do your job, you have to live in.
But like New York, it can be a hard city to love. It feels its age, functional but a little run-down, maybe. It feels like if you tried really hard, you could probably still install Photoshop off a stack of floppy disks. You start to think about it the same way you think about NYC’s objectively amazing public transit system: why can’t it be better? Why can't it be slimmer? Why can't we just use Aviary and iPhoto and get our RAM back? Why isn't it dead yet?
Here’s the paradox: What makes Photoshop both anachronistic and indispensable? I figured to find out, I needed to dig into its past. After all, Paris has its catacombs, and Photoshop has its code. I decided to don my archeologist hat and do some excavating, i.e., I flew over to the West Coast and talked to some people.
by Paul Miller, Verge | Read more:
Illustration: uncredited
