Today’s Question: If you had to guess, when do you think Photoshop will be discontinued, at least for photographers?
Tim’s Quick Answer: If I had to guess, I would say February 19, 2030, could be the date that Photoshop is discontinued. But that is really just a tongue-in-cheeck guess, and my real answer is quite a bit more nuanced than that.
More Detail: First, let me be clear that I don’t have any information about when Photoshop might be discontinued, and obviously the software could be around for many more years to come. My “guess” of February 19, 2030, simply reflects an upcoming milestone, representing 40 years since the original release of Photoshop 1.0 in 1990.
To me the real question is when Photoshop will no longer be a meaningful part of a workflow for photographers, and for many photographers that date has already passed.
Consider, for example, how much can be done with Adobe Camera Raw, and by extension Lightroom Classic. For a great many photographers, there’s no need to use Photoshop at all for most of their images, because so much can be done with Camera Raw or Lightroom. Keep in mind that for the most part Camera Raw and Lightroom maintain feature parity, so regardless of which you’re using you will have access to (nearly) all the same features.
When Lightroom was first released, very few (if any) photographers would have considered it a replacement for Photoshop. Over time, as the software improved, more and more photographers found that they were using Photoshop less and less. Some photographers, of course, have gotten to the point that they don’t need Photoshop at all (other than the fact that Camera Raw is effectively tied to Photoshop).
As Camera Raw and Lightroom continue to improve, this trend will continue. Added to this is that for many creative effects you can get better results processing your image with AI tools rather than using the filters and other adjustments in Photoshop. I suspect at some point in the future, Adobe will recognize that they have improved Camera Raw so much, and that so few photographers are using Photoshop for much of anything, that they can unbundle Camera Raw from Photoshop and therefore they can stop developing new features for Photoshop.
But again, all of this is just based on my own thinking and opinion and is not informed in any way by any information I have about the future of Photoshop. And considering how much Camera Raw and Lightroom have been improved by Adobe over the years, I think it is only natural that there will be a shift at some point in the (perhaps near) future in the overall landscape of the tools from Adobe that photographers use.
Ultimately what this all means is that Adobe has done, in my opinion, a great job improving the editing capabilities of Camera Raw and the Lightroom ecosystem.
