I think I have uninstalled Photoshop for the last time on my stationary computer. It still lingers, usefully, on my iPad and there’s six months left of my yearly whatever.
Yes yes, all these images are filtered through the ipad Lightroom okay, I can’t just break THAT old of habits just like that! –scratches arms– I just need my filters, okay!
Now, to be completely honest I haven’t uninstalled Ps or Lr at all the last 25 years, but that’s mostly because of lack of alternatives and a stubborn habit.
These latest developements stem from me getting a new-old computer as of a couple of days. The one I had before crashed and crashed and crashed and crashed. OneDrive absolutely murdered my internal organisation system with the 15 second interval of it updating the entire folder tree over and over, and all kinds of bullshit was going on and most programs faltered and crashed. So we switched my computer to an old but good computer that a friend gave us.
We did a fresh installation of Windows and I tested it out and it worked without problems. Oh goodie!
Before I made any decisions about the new computer, the real test came along – installing my complicated partners: The Sims 4, and Adobe’s Photoshop and Lightroom which I use for my images. I hesitantly installed them and tried it out for a day or two. Seems to be working! Nice! Maybe I can use a computer again!
We installed the computer at my desk with everything, transferred SSDs and wrangled logins for a million different things, I settled down in my lounge chair and night-nighted the pug on the foot stool between my knees and settled in for a just a chill night with my seemingly functioning piece of technology… And it was all fine and good for like two hours.
Then, my new-old computer crashed.
My face lit up with the garish blue colour of the crash-screen, blue shadows filling the wrinkles caused by my disappointed scowl. The screen offered the same cryptic error-message as on my previous one before shutting down.
The whoosh of tech-rage that rattled through my system after two years of blue screens, violently crashing in on me along with my hopes that it would actually work now.
Fumes! Hiss!
Since the installation was completely new, we figured to check the task manager, and weirdly after just starting the computer again after the crash, there was like seven Adobe Crash-something modules bopping about in my CPU.
The hell?
Sort of-Beginning of the end
Now.. I have a 25 year old relationship with Photoshop, I was merely a wee teenager when Photoshop made its way into my computer workflow. It was great for a long time.
We’ve skipped through the meadows together year after year, edited images and played around with drawing on my cherished Wacom-board and making own headers for my blogs. We laughed together editing funny pictures of friends and family and the furry little goblins we call pets. A little later on, Lightroom entered to aid the setting of moods with my RAW-files from my DSLR. Things were still nice between us overall, a cosy little community.
But then 2015 came around. Suddenly, the ease of getting Photoshop once-a-version and just having it around ended. As Adobe-users, we now found ourselves with monthly annoying withdrawals from debit cards and therefore also recurring annoying contacts with their customer service if said debit card happened to not have the right amount when they tried to withdraw it.
My stable and predictable relationship with the UI slowly dissolved and morphed into recurring unexpected updates moving things around in my menus and adding bugs that wasn’t there before. Unwanted features cluttered it’s interior.
It was really disappointing for something I by then had used for 15 years. But I still found Photoshop so useful that I just sucked it up and kept on.
Eleven years later from that point of decrappifying Photoshop, every unwanted update brings a bright coloured banner telling me about all the new fancy AI-stuff that they added to bloat my program up against my will.
Still, my menu icons were missing, update after update. Changing the colour of the UI helped sometimes, the rest of the time I had to either guess or re-start the program 10+ times until they showed up.
With time, these incessant updates have started feeling like a mockery.
Ding! Here are more unwanted AI-features for you! AREN’T YOU HAPPY???
Perhaps it’s not entirely Adobe’s fault. Maybe it’s also a compounding effect of the insertion of in-my-face-unwanted AI-features in Notion, in my phone, in Gmail, in Windows, in WordPress, in other image editing softwares, in Feedly, in my DSLR camera, in Canva, in my fucking graphics card UI. I would add disappointment in Google’s stupid additions if it wasn’t for them absolutely ruining their search results 18 months ago already.
Maybe it’s also the addition of all the AI-slop in Pinterest, in Facebook, in Spotify, in Youtube, in Tumblr, in Instagram, in search engine results.
Jesus christ.
All of this HAS made me acutely aware that I am in fact too chronically screened up, but I’ve come to terms with it. Almost.
So, in “short” (I’ve spared you SO MUCH ranting okay), I think my relationship with Adobe has irreversibly changed. Late to the game and all that. But I am a creature of habit and the filters in Lightroom are just.. hard to replace. I’ll see what I can do, I have six months of their yearly bullshit left to research and try and find a complete replacement. I am learning Affinity, we’ll see if they cut it. It’s just sad. All of if. Enshittification. So much squandered potential all around the internet and tech.
Well, I’m gonna go cook food over a fire and then eat cake with my husband and my dad instead of reminiscing about the golden age of the internet. That’s unscreeny enough right?
