What Is Going On With Adobe?

Perfect strawberries. Real or completely AI generated?  What's your guess?
The answer is at the end of this post.  (click to enlarge)

I can't help but notice.  What in the world is going on with Adobe and their photography editing programs? For those of you who are Lightroom and Photoshop users have you noticed that Adobe, over the past 2 to 3 years, seems to be narrowly focused on features using artificial intelligence, especially "generative AI." I’m not so concerned by using just AI to help us create better selections and masks and such, but it is the ‘generative AI’ that has me concerned.  It seems to me the road that Adobe is now traveling is squarely heading toward photo illustration and compositing while leaving traditional photography and photographers such as myself as well as many of you, largely behind.

Some of you reading this may think these new AI based generative features are great.  That is fine.  I just ask that Adobe doesn’t leave the rest of us who don’t much care to use them behind.  Also, I am speaking from a traditional photography point of view and I know Adobe has customers, such as graphic designers and others, who also use these programs and find generative AI a wonderfully useful tool.  

When I look at the notes included with Lightroom and Photoshop software updates I almost always see the term “Firefly” and how it has been improved and/or expanded in its capabilities.  If you look in Lightroom and Photoshop you will see not only Adobe’s Firefly, but now also Google’s Nano Banana, OpenAI's GPTImage and Flux AI-based content generative software built right into them.  On the surface, one might be thankful for these advanced features that allow users to create finished products that were impossible in the past.  Oh!  But they are not quite free.  Adobe gives you a few ‘credits’ to do a few AI things but then charges you for more credits (when you quickly deplete your allocation) if you want to use them regularly.  It sounds as though they are luring us in with these whiz bang features and all the wonderful things generative AI can do then just when we want to jump in with both feet—they tell us to hand over our credit cards first.  But aren’t we already paying for use of the software with promised continual upgrades?

Maybe I am still living in the past? Maybe it is my age? Maybe it is my generation? Maybe it is the fact that I have practiced traditional photography for 55 years? I don’t have an answer, But it seems to me the future that Adobe is planning for us has a little to do with traditional photography and much to do with drastically altering content, generating new content out of thin air, creating moving images (video) out of a still image and creating photo illustrations of subject matter than never existed in reality rather than editing what I would call traditional photographs.

AI is now everywhere.  I gladly accept the fact that it is going to creep into most aspects of our lives and I accept it but with a watchful eye as, in my experience, I find it gets answers wrong on occasion.  (When challenged concerning wrong answers, it admits its mistake, goes back out and finds the right answers.)  But frankly, I’m not interested in using it to create photo illustrations and presenting images where the majority of those images are artificially generated rather than expressing my vision of the real world.  Yes, I’ve read up on these generative features, explored and played with them and even have generated content in a few of my images—mainly to educate and familiarize myself as well as illustrate to this blog's readers what can be done with these generative features.  They work as intended.  But I don’t intend to use them to create a false narrative and then present my images to you and the world as authentic.

All that said, I don’t want to take away from the wonderful advanced traditional editing features that are included in both Lightroom and Photoshop.  They are terrific and, thinking back when I first bought Photoshop in 2002, what we have today is far from the primitive abilities of the past.  The comprehensive features in Photoshop and Lightroom allow us to easily edit our images, rather than struggle as we had to do in the past.  I thank Adobe for all they have given us for traditional and non-traditional digital editing.  But….  As the saying goes, “Don’t forget where you came from.”  Don’t forget all of us photographers who have paid year after year after year for photographic features.  Don’t leave us behind just to create something technologically new.

I would be interested to hear what many of you would have to say about this. I am to the point where I am starting to entertain thoughts to look for alternative photo editing programs that keep us traditional photographers in the forefront rather than continue to provide updates and features that I most likely will never use—especially if Adobe decides to raise their prices.  

I still think Photoshop and Lightroom are terrific bargains for the money they charge.  However, there are many editing suites that could now take the place of Lightroom and Photoshop, such as Capture One, DXO PhotoLab, Affinity and On1.  I’m sure there are others as well.  My major concern with switching is my Lightroom library and catalog with the hundreds of thousands of image files that (most) are keyworded so any can easily be found through simple searches of the Lightroom database.  Keeping the database features of Lightroom would be a priority for me.  As for keeping my edits, that shouldn’t be a problem as I always write the metadata to the XMP sidecar files which would go with the image file and reflect the edits I have made in the Adobe programs.

Enough complaining already.  Anyone have an opinion, pro or con, about this?  I think many of us would be interested to hear it.

Answer: The photo at the top is of real strawberries.  No AI involved whatsoever.  I used an Olympus E-M1 Mark II camera with the Olympus 12-100mmm f/4 Pro lens to make it.

Join me over at my website, https://www.dennismook.com.  

Thanks for looking. Enjoy!  

Dennis A. Mook  

All content on this blog is © 2013-2026 Dennis A. Mook. All Rights Reserved. Feel free to point to this blog from your website with full attribution. Permission may be granted for commercial use. Please contact Mr. Mook to discuss permission to reproduce the blog posts and/or images.