Mint Primer: How can Photoshop survive AI onslaught?

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. NEW DELHI : Since the 1990s, Photoshop, an image-editing software, has become a colloquial verb for photo retouching. However, over the past two years, generative artificial intelligence (AI) has changed the way photo editing has worked so far, automating most of the steps into one-click commands.

This, though, hasn’t affected Photoshop's ubiquity—in fact, it may well be better suited for even more users now. The Adobe-owned photo-editing software, which started as a college project in the late 1980s, is a verb now like Xerox, Band-aid and Velcro. While there’s no official figure, the industry estimates it to have over 25 million monthly active subscribers.

Those using it without a licence could be exponentially higher. On average, well over 90% of all designers and creative professionals use Photoshop in some form, making it a bellwether in the global photo-editing and -designing industry. With the global market for photo-editing tools estimated at over $3 billion annually, Photoshop alone makes a sizable dent in the creative economy.

That was an early-stage fear. However, Adobe has implemented generative AI to work alongside designers and not replace them. The company’s proprietary AI model, Firefly, is now integrated into the application and is used to detect objects to remove, help co-design, edit images and posters, and more.

Photoshop’s idea of using generative AI is akin to what GitHub did with the technology: Use it to aid but not replace creators. This, experts believe, can speed up creativity processes, and more new users may end up using Photoshop instead of new editing applications replacing the tool. Yes.