[bitL]

Photoshop will be eaten by generative AI in the next few years. Lightroom is still the best, Illustrator is in a duopoly with CorelDRAW. I used to be a pro photo/cinematographer and I can replace most of my Photoshop needs with stable diffusion + ControlNet + ClipSeg. DaVinci with plugins made After Effect irrelevant for my needs as well. Certainly Adobe still has momentum but their future after they switched from engineering/art company to rentier monopoly company doesn't look that rosy.

[danaris]

> Photoshop will be eaten by generative AI in the next few years.

This is a laughable idea.

Even if professional artists want to use generative AI in their workflow, it won't be by replacing a tool like Photoshop. It will be by enhancing it.

And if you think the entire art profession will be "eaten by generative AI", then you clearly know very little about human nature.

People will always want to create art. People will always want to see and own art.

Even if some of that latter desire is satisfied by generative AI in the future, I guarantee you not all of it will be. For one thing, there will also always be people who feel that the human touch is more important—that AI art isn't "real" art—and thus, in a world where AI-generated art is ubiquitous, human-created art will become even more prized.

[bitL]

You are missing the point. It's fairly easy to replace Photoshop's layering, color correction, filters etc. by a regular software engineering. Where Adobe had extra edge was their retouching, masking and content filling ability. That is now going to be possible to incorporate anywhere by stable diffusion et al. Now Adobe will still have foothold in "legacy" projects with proprietary formats but all the new entrants will have no need to use it. Suddenly folks in Affinity/Serif can add those missing features and continue carving out more from Adobe's market share the way Japan went from crappy manufacturing in the 60s to bleeding edge tech in 80s.

[chefandy]

I've been in-and-out of every one of these stacks professionally for years. I was a professional graphic and interface designer for a decade, which involved photography, photo editing, motion graphics and other 2d animation, and digital illustration. I've done a bit of freelancing, specfically with branding, identity and print design, but it's mostly been full-time, in-house work. More recently, I have moved into 3D modeling, 3D animation, and game engine work. I've worked with the current generative tools in professional settings and did procedural art and design work long before the current fad. I've seen their progression, and know better than damn near anyone you'll meet where they stand in the commercial art world.

You're basing unsubstantiated predictions on top of assumptions to form dubious suppositions about the future of these things to change the topic from your patently absurd assertion that the largest player in most creative industries became "irrelevant," "years ago." You're clearly going to continue pretending personal preferences, based on an incredibly narrow slice experience in this huge collection of creative industries, is generalizable to the rest of it. I'd say there's about zero percent chance you're going to start engaging in this conversation in good faith, so I'll let you finish it by yourself: you don't need my help to try and convince yourself that you know what you're talking about.

[bitL]

My business background tells me Adobe Photoshop is going to be commoditized because their main advantage in retouching, content filling and masking can be now done by any 10-year old with a beefier GPU at the same or better quality. Even ridiculously bad GIMP can now get the same state-of-art tools Adobe has so inevitably its value proposition will be only appealing to existing "legacy" customers and dropping everywhere else.