Jon Sienkiewicz Blog

Unless you live on flotsam near Point Nemo in the South Pacific Ocean, you've already heard that Adobe Photoshop is now 35 years old. Photographers, graphic artists and other visual creatives—but especially photographers—should by all means celebrate.

A High-Tech Symbiotic Relationship
Photoshop and the digital camera phenomena can thank each other—to a large degree—for their success. Photoshop appeared before consumer-level digital cameras and therefore had a few minutes to mature.

Digital cameras gave photographers—and just as significantly—computer geeks a way to "get images onto our Macs and PCs." Additionally, digital cameras gave photographers an alternative to analog film photography, and while some resisted the newer tech at first, everyone had a great way to explore new, creative avenues while improving the quality of our images. Photoshop did that.

At the very least, we can say Photoshop and digital cameras principally owe their rapid market velocity to their mutual influence. They have a robust high-tech symbiotic relationship.

Artificial Intelligence is quickly becoming the third leg of this stool, and I'm personally happy and excited that Adobe is at the absolute forefront. Looking back at what's happened over the past 3.5 decades, it's impossible to guess what enchanting magic the future holds.

What's Next?
While digital cameras appear to be shuffling off into the sunset, decimated by the capabilities of smartphones, Photoshop endures and adapts to the changes in the ecosystem. I now edit my iPhone images using Photoshop on my iPad Pro. Oh, sure, I still mostly shoot multi-megapixel images with expensive dedicated cameras and real lenses, but as much as I fight it, I can feel the threshold level of my desire for perfection falling lower and lower.

If Photoshop never existed, another software would have taken its place, but it wouldn’t have been as revolutionary or cutting-edge. It probably would not be as conscientious about protecting the rights and intellectual property of creatives, and it certainly would not be seamlessly integrated with other important tools like Lightroom, Illustrator, Adobe Stock, or the wide selection of Adobe's web-based and mobile applications.

So grab a mug of coffee (and a cupcake, if you've got one) and open an image using Adobe Camera Raw. Create a Layer Mask, experiment with Generative Fill, do some Color Grading or maybe just delete your Ex using the Generative Remove tool. Save the file as a DNG (another Adobe contribution) so you'll be able to access it no matter how camera makers' Raw files mutate. Think about all of the things you can do with an image—and think about the software that made them all possible.

Happy birthday, Photoshop.

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—Jon Sienkiewicz