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THE DEATH OF PHOTOSHOP ☠️
I’ve been hearing about the death of Photoshop for years.
Figma was going to kill it. Canva was going to kill it. Affinity was going to kill it. Browser-based tools, no-code tools, mobile apps, generative AI. Every few years, another very convincing murderer enters the room.
And yet Photoshop is still sitting there, 35 years old, asking why my scratch disk is full.
I don’t think Photoshop disappears. I think Adobe keeps doing what it has always done: bolting modern conveniences onto a massive, deeply entrenched piece of creative infrastructure.
AI generation and editing. Faster selections. Smarter masking. Cloud documents. Third-party integrations. Better handoffs between apps. Anything that reduces the number of times we have to perform a 14-step ritual just to remove a background.
There are now faster and friendlier tools for plenty of individual jobs. But Photoshop remains the place you open when the task becomes oddly specific, slightly cursed, or impossible to explain to anyone who does not do creative work.
Maybe Photoshop’s future is not being the best tool for every job. Maybe it survives by being the tool that can still handle nearly every job when the simpler one taps out.
Do you think Photoshop eventually gets replaced, or does Adobe keep modernizing the immortal beast forever?
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