Web­de­signer Depot web­site has a great overview of 20 Years of Adobe Pho­to­shop. While I have Adobe Pho­to­shop CS4; I find myself using it less and less, and I won­der whether it will remain as rel­e­vant to Pho­tog­ra­phers in par­tic­u­lar in the future. The touch up tools now avail­able in  Adobe Light­room / Apple Aper­ture and the like could very well ren­der Pho­to­shop to the realm of super spe­cial­ized tool for Graphic Artists and Web Designers.

That said, it really has been a phe­nom­e­non; so much so that it is often used as a verb:

That image looks photoshopped!

A result of that is that in pop­u­lar cul­ture it now stands for all that is wrong with mag­a­zine images of skinny mod­els. It is accused of being com­pli­cated, dif­fi­cult to learn and use, and extremely expen­sive. So much so that it must be one of the most pirated pieces of soft­ware on the internet.

Still amaz­ing soft­ware though…