Why is Photoshop still a Verb?
I don't tend to talk about my tools I use to produce this content much on the site but with all the recent insanity surround Adobe and getting sued by the US government I thought I would let more people know about my workflow a little more. I am currently very hard at work on my next site Learning to Walk Again.
Along with all the web design tools I used to create it I've also am using a competing tool to Photoshop to draw the titles that are featured though the site. The digital paint brushes I used Freestlyer are available for both the industry standard Photoshop as well as Procreate and Affinity. If I made this in Photoshop it would be absolutely no better at all. The mountains of extra money I would have to pay for, the hassles of dealing with going through all the legal terms with a fine tooth comb, the horrible state of the Adobe forums in modern times, all of that gets bypassed by using Affinity Photo Instead.
Photoshop was a groundbreaking tool at the start of the 1990s. Its domination in the field in the first year of development was to the point that it became a part of our modern lexicon as both a noun and a verb. While slang from that time has evolved you have to wonder why there hasn't been a replacement term for a product which is no longer pushing the boundries of what tech could do with imagery.
It already started losing its edge as soon as the late half of the 90s. ImageReady was Photoshop's move into going beyond print into web usage but couldn't even survive in the market for a decade. The same year it died another branch of Photoshop came to market now in the form of a cataloging and editing combo called Lightroom.
Image cataloging software had a niche but it just wasn't a life changing experience of Photoshop at the time that product came out. Lightroom gradually had the capability of moving some PS users over to its workflow but it was clear Adobe innovation was cooling off dramatically in the 2000s and 2010s.
The Affinity suite came out in the 2010s and has taken up the baton of pushing how image creation and modification could be done with modern suites and the hardware they run on. Macromedia showed what could be done merging drawing with photo-editing tools you would think at some point InDesign would have been the first for integrating full drawing and image editing tools directly into its layout program.
Why say you are Photoshoping something if the person is likely using something else or a tool more advanced in its workflow?