The sad state of Adobe Photoshop

Adobe is desperately trying to squeeze money out of customers by making them believe that their products are the gold standard in image processing and spearheading the “AI Revolution”

The truth about the technical state of Photoshop, Adobe as a company and their so called AI is …

Not only the AI revolution is not happening. In fact Adobe is offering a technically outdated product as state of the art and at the same time putting their customers at a disadvantage wherever they can.

Especially that their terms of services basically are allowing Adobe to steal their customers intellectual property for their own purposes has been creating outrage for years.

For their criminal practices, especially harassing’s customers with insane subscription rules making it extremely costly to even cancel a subscription, they are finally sanctioned by the US authorities. Let us hope that they face severe punishment and that top managers of the company will be held liable.

Anyway I bought a subscription to upgrade my old PS 6CS version from 2012 to use their newest Photoshop product with all of the promised new features and AI in particular.

Users who hoped for a plethora of new productivity tools and features, stellar performance gains with their incredibly more powerful hardware will be thoroughly disappointed.

The product is in a laughable state and basically still on the technical level of 2012, bugged, slow, inaccurate and cumbersome. Honestly the upgrade is not worth it.

Some highlights:

1. Even basics do not work properly.
   • Custom key configurations break and get reset frequently.
   • UI interaction is a catastrophe.
     • Keystrokes are only working in a specific tool or layer context which mostly makes no sense and forces you out of workflows constantly. The focus of this context is changed randomly if you undo a certain step forcing your out of flow constantly.
     • Without the exact context keystrokes are not working at all. Meaning if you are working somewhere on a layer and want to get back to the brush they key is simply not working. you need to use the mouse …. Its plain horrible. It was not like this in PS6.
     • Changing values in the tool panels with pen or mouse often does not alow you to set an endpoint but gets you stuck in an endless change loop.
   • Memory management is basically absent leading to constant out of memory errors even on 64 GIG machines while processing rather small files.
   • Problems with GPU integration are everywhere rendering GPU support basically useless. The clues less support staff tells you not to use GPU Acceleration features if you run into problems … Its like as if Porsche would tell you not to drive your car if you experienced issues …
   • Processing speed is abhorrent. There is not really a performance gain at all compared to the 2012 version. Working with the same files from 2012 does not show improvement. On a machine which is insanely more powerful.
   • Text management is still on the level of PS 3. Barely usable.
   • Rendering of PDF Text is like a lucky draw … Often the text does not render properly breaking your design. Only rasterizing solves such issues … Insane …
   • Their tools can still not create good object maskings … now AI would certainly be helpful here. Alas its nowhere to be found. Instead we are dealing with the same oudated tools from a decade ago.
   • Patching is still not able to realistically remove blemishes on sightly larger areas without blotching everything. FS and Blurring are still a thing … laughable
2. Improvement of productivity tools did not happen. Its the same old toolset with some cosmetic changes that are advertised as if we were now living on planet MARS.
3. QM on the Marketplace is not happening. It offers tools which are obviously either extremely bad or fake.
4. The Bridge application could be the perfect complement as a file manager but it is so bugged that it is just a nuissance. The performance is ridiculously bad even with ultra fast NAND SSD. Creating thumbnails takes minutes and need to be recreated almost each time you review a certain folder irrelevant of what you define in the settings. Settings break all the time ánd need to be reapplied.
5. Even the removal tool already consumes your “Generative AI” credits. If this trend continues we will soon have a situation established that forces you to pay money for every mouse click …

Finally, the highly praised AI is either hilariously absent from the program or generates laughably bad results. Instead you can use Adobes ridiculous “Pay per Try” model and use Firefly to hope that the programs fake AI randomizes something halfway useful. The results of this are now cluttering their commercial image services making it unusable. Nude photography is excluded even from the “AI” functionality.Its sad that we are sunken so far as to apparently accept such dubious or even criminal business practices in general and particularly from a company who as always created lackluster products but is now openly trying to cheat their customers to an extend that would not have been possible in the past.

I am also honestly disappointed by the many YouTubers who are giving this product good reviews by praising features that do not deliver any real added value but generously leaving out that this product is completely outdated, bug ridden and AI is mostly absent.

Fact is … companies like Adobe or Phase One do simply have no idea on how to leverage AI and improving a product. They are big mouthed about those thing while they do not even have age old standards like image file management mastered. Their expensive applications are slow and cumbersome and full of bugs they can not fix. Its laughable what those guys are offering here ….