This is NOT photoshop anymore!!

I honestly feel that Photoshop is no longer Photoshop. It is becoming a fundamentally different product, increasingly designed around AI-assisted creation at the expense of the traditional manual tools and workflows that made Photoshop what it is.

I want to make something very clear: I am not against AI, innovation, or change. Quite the opposite. I have been working with Photoshop practically since its earliest years, and I have often preferred using Beta versions precisely because I enjoy experimenting with new tools and new possibilities. I have welcomed AI features when they complement manual work and make it faster or expand what we can do — features such as 3D object rotation are a perfect example.

The problem is that the balance now seems to have been lost.

Basic, historical Photoshop operations are becoming unnecessarily difficult, unpredictable, or actively obstructed by new behaviours.

For example, guides, rulers and snapping behaviour make even something as elementary as drawing a straight line frustrating: the line gets pulled, distorted or behaves unpredictably because everything seems to want to snap to something. I disable these extras, and when I reopen Photoshop they are back again.

Brushes have become another struggle. Getting a simple brush with the tip and behaviour I actually want — including something as basic as a normal round brush tip — can require opening multiple panels and changing settings just to partially restore behaviour that used to be immediate and obvious. At times the brush appears as a line or dash rather than the round tip I selected.

Even creating a new document has become unnecessarily complicated. Instead of a straightforward workflow, I find myself going through several clicks and screens only to eventually get back to the basic presets and choices I wanted in the first place.

The colour workflow is another example. Entering a hexadecimal colour such as #9C3E35 used to be one of the simplest things imaginable: copy, paste, done. Now I am confronted with a colour-selection interface that feels needlessly complicated for an operation that should take seconds.

More seriously, finished images or drawings that I import into another document can appear washed out or different from the way I created them. Photoshop then asks me to modify or manage their colours. But these may be images on which I have already spent hours carefully balancing colour, light and shadow. I should not have to reconstruct that work simply because I am placing the finished image into another Photoshop document. Colour-management warnings have their purpose; altering or disrupting an established visual result is another matter entirely.

None of these problems, taken individually, may sound catastrophic. Together, however, they fundamentally damage the experience of using Photoshop as a professional manual graphics tool. Basic operations that were once almost instinctive now involve fighting the software.

And that is what worries me most.

Photoshop became an institution because it was an extraordinarily powerful digital workbench. Many of us still use it exactly that way: as a drawing board, a graphics tool, a photo-editing environment and a place where we create things. We want AI available when it helps us. We do not want the entire application reorganised around the assumption that AI should increasingly do the work for us.

Please do not interpret criticism like this as resistance from users who simply cannot adapt to new technology. I have spent decades adapting to Photoshop, actively testing new versions and embracing genuinely useful innovations. I am complaining precisely because I do want Photoshop to evolve.

But evolution should add capabilities without destroying the efficiency, predictability and directness of the fundamental tools underneath them.

At this point I have reinstalled the traditional release hoping to recover some peace and a usable workflow. That should not be the solution.

If necessary, I would genuinely prefer Adobe to separate the concepts more clearly — even a Photoshop AI-oriented experience and a traditional/professional Photoshop experience — rather than gradually transforming the entire application into something built primarily around generative workflows. I would regret losing some of the recent innovations, because several of them are genuinely excellent and save enormous amounts of time. Ideally, of course, we should not have to choose.

AI and traditional Photoshop can coexist. That combination could be extraordinary.

But the traditional Photoshop workflow must remain a first-class citizen.

Please remember that many of us are still here because we want to use Photoshop to make things ourselves. We need the software to assist us, not constantly stand between our hands and our work.

I understand the enormous amount of development effort behind these changes, and I do appreciate it. But from the perspective of a very long-term user who has enthusiastically followed Photoshop through decades of evolution, it currently feels as though the product has lost its compass in the excitement surrounding AI.

Please don’t let this become the new Photoshop.