I've spent my entire life reading, writing, condensing and explaining stuff, and I'm pretty good at it, but I find reading this stuff intensely tiring.

But my underlying concern remains. Why are people who want to communicate important ideas leaving it to Claude — which writes like an obscurantist gnome wizard from a bad fantasy novel — to do so, only to lead us to use LLMs to corral it into a less gnomic form?

People used to describe their own products in their own words.

There is a byline with a fairly google-able name (reasonably uncommon), and it appears to represent a real person who was formerly an intern at Criteo. English may not be their first language, I guess.

But yes — I think it is a little unfortunate in the context.

Except that perhaps, deep down, all those people who thought software engineering should be a chartered profession were right.

Over the years I have tried Capture One — it's fine, I dunno, I just didn't settle with it, even though I shoot a lot of portraits which is its comfort zone. (I actually started out with it, free thing from SanDisk)

I really like DxO Photolab but I know this app enrages lots of people; I particularly like the tone curve handling, FilmPack integration, etc.

Lately I have been learning ART, the RawTherapee fork, and I have to say that despite its very idiosyncratic interface, I like this quite a lot.

There are people who live inside photoshop the way developers live inside VSC or Zed or emacs.

Some of those photographers then use their new baseline familiarity with Capture One to test out Affinity for further edits.

But you're just never going to have the time to burn your bridges with the platform in one go. I don't think that is very different from the way developers work; in practice nobody with any serious obligations can simply switch language and toolchain in one go.

So there is attrition, but there is never going to be a threshold over which people cross and get a widespread revolt. I'm not even sure that happened with the switch to Creative Cloud, because they padded that transition by making it easier on photographers and with the other single app plan (that I think no longer exists?)

My own feeling is that there are serious cracks in the way Photoshop works. For example the "smart objects" bodge when they could do what Affinity Photo does with live filter layers, not to mention (when comparing with Affinity) Photoshop's weaker layer blend controls, lack of cross-model curves, lack of a frequency separation tool, culture of over-reliance on plugins.

But Photoshop has things Affinity does not, yet — a mature DAM/Bridge integration, some of the more advanced warp tools, etc., and tiny details like better perlin noise generation.

So it's like the situation with Word, isn't it — 95% of people use only a tiny fraction of what Word can do, but they don't all use the same tiny fraction.

People have their reasons to switch or not switch; even among hobbyist photographers who complain about the cost of everything else, the price of the photography plan does not seem to be one of them (thanks in part to Adobe's strategic reliance on Amazon Prime Day/Deal Days bundles)

I used to be much more aggressively anti-Adobe than I am now. I am never going to use Creative Cloud again myself, mind you, because I do not need anything it uniquely does anymore.

This stuff comes up a lot, to be fair.

e.g. have you ever noticed how people have come to assume that "X co-operated with Y" only means "X did what Y asked without complaint"?

I pointed this out to someone recently who had assumed that someone else's use of the word "co-operate" was implicitly threatening. If you watch too much US police procedural drama or true crime TV, it is…

(Also, sorry for my slightly spiky tone in that reply!)

The question asks "Can you…?"

This is actually a yes or no question. Yes I can, or no I can't.

The fact that we also use "can you tell me…" to mean something like "please describe…" doesn't change that.

Bun was a conversion of the source code to a different language.

You really need to sit down with a Photoshop user to see how they feel about it and how they approach alternatives; it took me no time to adapt from Photoshop + Wacom tablet to Affinity Photo + Wacom tablet, but I know photographers who won't because it's "not right".

Serif had more luck converting Illustrator users to Affinity Designer, and made the right decision to release Designer first, because Illustrator users were much more frustrated with Adobe, and because giving those users what they wanted helped get past the way the app does not "feel" exactly the same.

There is no way that a "pixel-accurate compliance" test suite can capture what it is that makes these applications the way they are.

I think it might be possible to slop-code an Excel clone because — truly minor interactivity quibbles aside — it can be tested with a truly exhaustive suite. The clone can be proved to do what it is supposed to do, over whatever subset one would choose to implement.

But Photoshop is not an application in the same way that Excel is an application.

(Not least because while powerful, Excel, like Word, is an implementation of an existing idea. Photoshop is the OG; it has all the history of the OG)

Photoshop is also a surface and a medium. It has a feel, it has responsiveness. It's like oil painting or watercolour: its own thing, with its own pen/brush dynamics, its own interactivity.

Part of the reason people don't want to switch away to Affinity (even though Affinity is free as in beer, highly capable and in some ways better) is just that to a set of very hardcore users, it does not have this feel. They just don't like how it feels.

Automated testing that focusses on pixel-precise rendering misses the point. It may actually matter less that it renders PSDs pixel-accurately than that it actually feels right.

If you are not convinced by my argument, look at "dodge and burn retouching". For better or worse, high end fashion photo retouching is done in an extremely precise, wildly technical, tiny subset of Photoshop tools.

If you want to replace Photoshop it has to be responsive at that level. And since that level is partly subjective experience, it's going to take some people.