Jul 7, 2009
Forget User Licenses, Photoshop Should Require Drivers Licenses
If you want to drive something as powerful as a car, you need a license. You need to prove to society that you know how to operate it in such a way that innocent civilians will not be endangered. If you want to drive something as big and dangerous as a bus, you need yet another license on top of that.
In the world of image editing, Photoshop is roughly the equivalent of a 747 with side mounted nuclear missile launchers. And yet, we let any old designer get his or her hands on it for less than 200 bucks. This is dangerous. As if Photoshop Disasters wasn’t proof enough, I present the following evidence:
A few weeks ago, I was walking through the Union Square Subway station in NYC and I saw this anti-smoking ad.
Ok. Smoking is pretty dangerous. This is a good cause. Weird language but whatever…I can deal with that. But check out this detail.
Apparently cigarettes let you keep your right hand.
Photoshop is obviously too powerful a tool to let mere mortals near it. Erasing someone out of a picture should be so hard that there are only a few people on earth who can do it and those people would never let something like this happen.
It is interesting that when something like photo-editing becomes this simple, we will have to recalibrate our expectations. Making complicated tasks simple will always have a downside. I just hope that we don’t make passenger planes as easy to drive as Photoshop is easy to use.
