I am glad that I never decided to become a photoshop pro. I always contemplated about it, seemed attractive for a while, but glad that I decided against it. RIP r/photoshopbattles.

It was in the endless list of new shiny 'skills' that feels good to have. Now I can use nano-banana instead. Other models will soon follow, I am sure.

Retouching is an art. To the pro, this is just another tool to increase efficiency. You pay them not just for knowing how to use Photoshop, but for exercising good judgement. That said, I imagine this will shrink the field, since fewer retouchers will be able to do the same work, unless the amount of work goes up commensurately. Will people get more retouching done if the price goes down? Not sure.

Interesting take. I'm a programmer, but learned Photoshop in the early 2000s and had a blast making and editing images for fun. Sure, the generative models today can do a far better job than anything I could come up with, but that doesn't detract from the experience and skills I picked up over the years.

If anything, knowing Photoshop (I use Affinity Designer/Photo these days) is actually incredibly useful to finesse the output produced by AI. No regrets.

If you commented it a decade ago, I would say that at least you own the program and skills in case Google decides to turn off the lights or ask prohibitive price tag. Now you need to pay subscription for PS and maybe there would be some decent open weight model released.

Programming and everything else will eventually fall to automation, too. It's just a matter of time.

Engineering probably takes a while (5 years? 10 years?) because errors multiply and technical debt stacks up.

In images, that's not so much of a big deal. You can re-roll. The context and consequences are small. In programs, bad code leads to an unmaintainable mess and you're stuck with it.

But eventually this will catch up with us too.

it's still a useful skill to know photoshop. AI images can be great but you are almost always going to want to A. create the base composition yourself B. clean up artifacts in the AI generation and C. layer AI compositions into a final work.

[dead]