Integration Perfected, Photoshop Unleashed?

Some hints to future trends with CS3 and Quark have large implications for Photoshop and what it will do years from now

This article on QuarkVsInDesign.com is a bombshell: it appears some information on Adobe Creative Suite 3, Quark 7 and beyond was leaked to the design community through a simple survey asking some questions about hypothetical future products. There wasn’t much detailed information but just enough to see how Adobe and Quark are testing their users for new products that may be months or years away. When you’re done reading this article check it out at QuarkVsInDesign.com, because it’s very illuminating.

Or take the survey for yourself.

This article discusses how these envisioned tools will affect Photoshop, and what I see the trends turning toward in the far future.

Photoshop Is Everywhere

And by that I mean Photoshop’s tools are everywhere. Illustrator creates some excellent transparency and bitmap effects, just like Photoshop. InDesign can create feathered edges, drop shadows, and transparencies just like Photoshop. And with its latest version (6.5), QuarkXPress has QuarkVista, which can apply editable curves, levels and other image-editing functions right within the page layout application, but you don’t need to use Photoshop because it does it—just like Photoshop (okay, well, the interface is quite different, but….). Is there an identity crisis going on here? Before Creative Suite, the Adobe applications more or less kept to themselves. It was expected that if you were going to lay out some pages, you were going to do it in InDesign. To try to use Photoshop or Illustrator would be a big faux pas in the eyes of a real design professional: “Use the right tool for the right job.” But before long I started to see many of the ads coming through my production department from agencies and freelancers were created in Illustrator, and I wasn’t sure why. I assumed it was because they thought, why buy two or three programs when you can buy one that does them all? I thought that was strange thinking. But in the years since then, as the companies have made these applications ever more feature-rich and powerful, it’s easier and easier to have one program that can do all you need, especially if you are from the era of designers as “specialists” instead of “one-stop shops.”

For Adobe, I really think it was with the Design Collection (the time of Photoshop 5.5, Illustrator 8, Acrobat 3 and early GoLive versions) that the integration process began. It made a lot of sense because more and more designers needed the whole shebang, but the evolution of this concept changed the software a lot more than we would have expected. The applications grew more inseparable (who nowadays buys Adobe software in separate boxes? I’d like to see those figures) and by the time Creative Suite 1 came around a few years ago the applications were not only inseparable but, in a pinch, swappable.

And now we look to Creative Suite 3 and rumors that it will allow InDesign and the other CS3 applications to execute some Photoshop filters and effects as well as work with a Photoshop file’s layers and stacking order. That’s big news. But if the other applications are doing Photoshop’s thing, what is there for Photoshop to do?

A Step Behind Aperture?

Is it possible Photoshop will move to digital photography, asset management and camera raw editing? It has been going that direction since versions 7 and CS, and the effects and filters have been showing up more and more in other applications. If Photoshop does begin to focus on photography, then it will find itself facing a stiffer competition in Apple’s Aperture product, which is pretty new but will undoubtedly be hyper-slick and ultra-cool (though we’re not sure if it will actually be a robust tool). And there’s plenty more products out there that cater to the pro photography and even amateur digital photography market, such as Apple’s iPhoto among others.

Adobe Is Goliath, Just Not In The Way You Think It Is

Who knows what strategy Adobe has for Photoshop? All we designers can do is watch the trends and see what happens next. But we can watch the tools and palettes move from one application to the next, from ImageReady to Photoshop to Illustrator and InDesign. Is Photoshop losing its identity? Will it become something new, a true photographer’s application? Will it leave the layout and type tools to applications like InDesign and Illustrator? Or will the Creative Suite continue to integrate until there’s not many differences left between the applications and we’ll just have one large piece of software that does everything? I’d bet on the latter. And the rumored features and tools in CS3 suggest that continued integration is going to happen.