In the beginning, there was the Photoshop~
Over time, the list of things a person might reasonably wish to do to pixels grew rather unweildy. Remember Photoshop CS3 Extended? I do. Remember the "3D hat" option? I remember a time when the hue and cry was for Adobe to stop adding features to the "bloated" Photoshop (and I remember waiting 5 minutes for CS2 to load).
Cutting a lengthy reminisce short, we got Lightroom. It's bundled with Photoshop and remains a popular tool for photography-processing-minded folks. It's basically a set of already-existing tools--mostly from Bridge and Photoshop--rearranged into custom-designed interface and workflow for a major area of digital media.
Here we are again; Adobe has a certain reputation among independent digital paint artists for being "evile" for being rental software loaded up with genAI and other such subscription features side-loaded onto an otherwise "good" digital painting tool. Adobe's brush format is the defacto pixel-art brush standard, borrowed in non-Adobe raster painting tools; Illustrator has most of the vector paint features popular in non-Adobe vector painting tools.
You have the tools, but they are spread across several programs and generally perceived to be "loaded up" with lots of features that aren't essential to the digital painting work task. Photoshop, Illustrator etc need to continue to evolve, explore, innovate and grow if the Adobe suite are to remain cutting edge industry-definers. But you also need people, living and working in the Adobe ecosystem with tools focused on their needs. Nobody should have to produce vector-drawn brush art in Illustrator or non-Adobe tools, and then "bring it into Photoshop for lighting/shading" for example, and yet this is seen as the workflow that artists are fated to follow.
I propose Photoshop Paint: a lightweight paint tool that joins the Photoshop family. This tool roams the space of painting-specific tools, creating vector and raster layers with vector and raster brushes, gradients, fills, shapes, and masks. Raster layers support lasso and "smart" selection, vector layers support re-coloring and there's a small set of basics (eyedropper, canvas move/rotate, Free Transform, layer fill/opacity).
Roll it into the Photoshop plan ($10/month) or... Do you want to be heros? You're losing a certain percentage to CSP, Affinity etc anyways, why not convert a few:
Sell it standalone for MacOS and Windows for $X ($45? $55?) one-time purchase, single-version only. If it's cheap enough (and remember, you're just selling UX development for features already buried under the mountains of the full suite), you don't need to fiddle with discounted upgrade deals and next-versio-selling whiz-bang features. Yes, sure, feel free to roll painting-like AI features into Photoshop... For example..."sketch to ink" conversion, using presets or an artist's local-built collection as a generative guide. And then, when you need to make a few more standalone sales, slide a toggle into the "next" version of Photoshop Paint to enable that tool. I know app and web versions require more continuous development so, sure, if you make a mobile version, make it exclusive to the Photoshop Family subscription plan.
Above all: This isn't a revisit of Photoshop Essentials.
Like Lightroom, this is a curated selection of the existing tools most needed (and most borrowed by single-sale competitors) for digital painting, reworked into a UX/UI better suited for that industry. It gives Adobe room to continue to explore every direction in its pillar apps, while using an arrangement of the "best bits" for one major use-case to drive constumer engagement and to serve as an inspiration point for future main-line tech. Pivot on your strengths, pls!
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