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Comment by coliveira

9 hours ago

In the case of Photoshop it is the software itself that is becoming useless. In a few years, using photoshop will be viewed the same as developing physical film, a process from a by-gone era that is still possible, but impractical.

This is an extremely bold claim and I think that it completely overlooks how Photoshop is used by professionals in practice. Professional users want extremely fine grained and precise control over their tools to achieve the specific results that they want. AI "image editing" is incapable of providing anything remotely similar.

  • Yes, "professional users" need this. The problem is that the group of professional users who need that will shrink really fast in the next few years.

I've recently re-instated a Photoshop subscription and its now part of my core AI generated asset workflow. AI is fantastic at art direction but it needs minor adjustments to make it production ready. E.g putting real screenshots in with correct placement, smoothing, editing out artefacts etc. I can't imagine the lengths I'd have to go to to instruct an LLM to do these tasks with words.

  • How much of what you do with Photoshop could be done with open source tools instead (GIMP, ImageMagick, etc), versus how much do you really need Photoshop for?

    One technique I’ve used for cleaning up AI-generated images, was a Python script driving ImageMagick-and an LLM helped write the Python script (although it took a few iterations, because the LLM’s first attempt didn’t actually work)