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Comment by sarora27 | Hacker News Reader

Former Adobe employee here. IME, most folks at Adobe don’t really care about listening to customers, providing a great customer experience, or putting the customer first. Most of the organization was highly political with different BUs fighting each other for “status”, budget and promotions. Can’t blame them though. The photoshop money machine keeps going brrrr so why bother.

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It's good though, because that attitude will sooner or later let the fortress collapse and we all want it that way.

People who cared about those things vacated the premises years ago.

When? In the 90s? I remember this was the common perception of Adobe in the mid 2000s when they bought Macromedia. Photoshop was a cash cow then that was more known for being industry standard than being high quality.

> The photoshop money machine keeps going brrrr

This makes me wonder. Who is actually using Photoshop today and why?

In the past, these were graphics designers and photographers. The latter already migrated to Lightroom, Capture One etc. Designers have so many tools to choose from, why would they use Photoshop? I understand for long-time users it's just inertia, but new users are spoiled for choice.

> why

I work in the manga/webtoon localization industry, and all files received from the original publishers that aren't TIFF are INDD or PSD. There is no choice but to use photoshop and indesign. Recently, I had to cough up money for the pricey indesign server in order to be able to ingest the .indd files en masse. There's no other choice. At first I thought I could do it with a mix of humans converting to .idml (the xml zip slightly less proprietary format) and my own python!... but you still need indesign for that first part, and after weeks of python, I gave up trying to parse that nasty mess that is idml. Now I run an ugly indesign js script that also talks to photoshop via bridge to create workabke files. It's disgusting and I pay the adobe tax, but it works. P.S. protip: never export images from indesign using any other option besides PDF, Indesign's built in image renders are awful for manga. Tune all the pdf settings so there is no quality loss, then "print" the pdf to image using ghostscript

Have you tried Affinity Designer?

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/designer/

One-off purchase price, like Adobe apps used to be, and a very reasonable price at that.

I love the afinity line but #1 affinity products only take in .idml, not .indd, so you still need indesign, and #2 affinity's own file formats are less well known that adobe's, therefore there are no tools out there to convert them or make them, and #3 affinity products do not support scripting (or have open enough file formats for me to make files) like adobe ones do, which is essential for creating files for the localization team to work on.

I figured that industry would use Clip Studio Paint EX?

"This makes me wonder. Who is actually using Photoshop today and why?"

Photoshop has unrivalled features - not just photo editing, but also digital painting, animation and even limited video editing. At one time, Adobe even added 3D features to Photoshop (which they later removed). Photoshop also supports a massive market of third-party add-ons like plugins, brushes, scripts, effects, LUTs etc.

In a different comment, I mentioned that no other software can rival Photoshop in learning resources. So yes, Photoshop is a monster in features, bloat, in clunky UI - and still dominant in design and photography fields.

CG artists have no real alternative. Digital matte painting and certain styles of concept art require a mix of painting tools, photobashing tools and plug-in integration that can’t be replicated with anything else efficiently.

Games studios, VFX studios, and other companies doing that kind of artwork are going to be licensing Adobe products for decades to come.

I work in a game studio and Photoshop is more of an accessory than a required tool for my workflow now. Concept artists in my team are having a great time using Clip Studio. For the 3d department substance painter is the king. So adobe still wins

If you have legacy files as PSD, or your customers have them, then you need to keep purchasing Photoshop no matter what.

Because it's the industry standard, and I presume because it's still quite good. The only modern thing I have to compare it with is GIMP (probably not a fair comparison), but when I last used Photoshop it was already nicer than GIMP is now, and that was probably about 20 years ago.

Photographers have advanced retouching workflows which are not possible in Lightroom. Lightroom is like a point and shoot, Photoshop is like a DSLR

Nitpick: they’re complementary. LR has cataloguing/sorting/filtering/metadata handling features that PS doesn’t have, and has an “edit in Photoshop” option for the more complicated workflows you mention. Not many people would enjoy using Bridge and PS to sort their photos.

I am a professional Lightroom user that deals with about 700-1000 shots per week (automotive photography). I estimate that I use the Lightroom–Photoshop–Lightroom round-trip editing for retouch on about 10–20% of my shots. The pair taken together is really powerful stuff and I haven't found anything better for dealing with large volumes of photos, each of which requiring adjustment of some sort.

I'm a long-time Photoshop user (since 1994), and my business, Filter Forge, started as a Photoshop plugin. Nowadays all my design work is done in Figma, which is fantastic. My Photoshop usage nowadays is limited to editing and enhancing pixel images.

Modern Photoshop feels extremely bloated. Slow to start, slow to paste images, cumbersome in other aspects. Since I'm using it much less frequently than I used to, I'm considering switching to an open source equivalent -- like I did with my 3D needs: I already switched from 3DS Max to Blender.

At least for designers who also do print, most of them will depend heavily on Illustrator, inDesign and Acrobat. And since you buy these programs in a package, you’ll also get Photoshop. So it doesn’t need to be the best at what it does… it just needs to be good enough. EDT. That, and, probably more important: schools keep pushing the Adobe Creative Suite on their students.

Lightroom is not an alternative to photoshop for retouching.

There’s no real standard alternative for advanced retouching afaik.

Aftereffects and I design are also the industry standard in their areas.

More like, who is actually paying for photoshop... I get why people use it, it is the "best" app, and familiar..

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