In the age of Instagram and Snapchat, do we really need to learn Photoshop?
It seems like everyone with a smartphone is a photographer these days. With how advanced our camera phones are becoming, and the latest technologies showing up in our apps, there are dozens of ways to take amazing photos with just a few taps of the screen.
So why does everyone continue to talk about Photoshop? Many individuals still become Adobe specialists, plenty of jobs require skills and experience with it, and we even offer customized training for it. Clearly, it is still in demand, but is it still useful despite all of the other options out there?
The answer is a resounding yes! Photoshop is a powerhouse that goes worlds beyond what our phones can do. These apps are designed to be intuitive and perform the most common functions people need, and for the most part, they succeed. Anyone can add a sparkly filter and brighten up their selfie with a swipe or two, but what happens when that filter doesn’t do exactly what you want?
Let’s say you have a photo from a recent vacation and you want to remove the strangers walking along the beach behind you. Or perhaps you need to remove some branding or personal information from a picture. There are apps that will attempt to do these things for you, but they typically leave smudges, blurs, or strange spots left behind. The app might even take out the wrong thing completely, and you’re stuck struggling to make it do what you want.
These are situations where Photoshop still shines. While the rest of our “quick and easy to use” apps try to guess what you want, high-end photo editing software gives you full control over every element of your picture.
I have been able to take old family photos and make them look new again, or completely alter and customize some stock photography to fit what a client needs for their branding. Changes like that would be next to impossible to recreate on my phone. Even many of the basic free software available for computers would struggle to match the skill of Adobe.
Does that mean I use Photoshop for everything? No. It’s all about the right tool for the right job. I will happily use my phone apps to play around with a photo before tossing it up on social media. They can be a lot of fun to use after all!
But if I really need to fine-tune an image, then without a doubt I’m loading up Photoshop.
