Thoughts on Innovation in software for photographic editing
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On a recent KelbyOne CommunityLIVE! episode a discussion started around innovation in editing software that i thought was interesting and I wanted to share some of the thoughts therein.
The person opening the discussion took the position that all the innovation happening in the photographic editing space was coming from small companies and that the big companies, specifically Adobe, were no longer innovating, more like catching up.
The premise was thereby put forward that Adobe only did Sky Replacement after it was delivered successfully in Luminar. This is factually correct as Luminar offered sky replacement as a proclaimed feature well before Adobe did.
Another position was taken that Topaz had really been pushing hard in sharpening, noise reduction and image resizing, doing in what discussion members stated was overall a better job than Adobe was doing.
Everyone expects Adobe will catch up at some point but wonder why these smaller companies seem to be there first almost all the time. I can speak to some of this based on work history as a CTO for an enterprise grade software company. While for many of us, Adobe products are seen as personal tools, Adobe is first and foremost an enterprise software company.
The Company Size Dilemma
A real benefit of a smaller company is commonly seen to be agility. This concept is taught at all business schools. A flatter organization, with fewer departments and fewer people will often have significantly fewer constraints and fewer committees than a larger company. When innovating, which always has an element of risk, agility is key. While no one wants to lose, a smaller organization by its very architecture needs to keep pushing the envelope because they are in the market growth phase of their life. To get new customers, they need to continue to gain awareness, and in conjunction with the move to (paid) “influencers” instead of professional and unbiased reviewers, they get more social media airtime.
This is not just in the photographic space. Fender Musical Instruments recently did saturation bombing by influencers on the release of the Acoustasonic Jazzmaster, an instrument all the influencers loved (most all received one at no cost), where professional musicians while crediting Fender for getting outside the box, found the guitar too expensive and neither a good acoustic nor a good electric. Fender sold a bunch of them. And a bunch of Acoustasonics are up for resale on various sites, and many music stores are sitting on unmoving inventory. Was the innovative (and it actually is) Acoustasonic a success? It depends on where you stand.
Fender got new customers, through a different marketing channel and likely call it successful. I know a lot of professional and semi professional musicians and no one that I know dropped the three grand on one.
Back to photo editing software
I have taught classes on image resizing for years. My favourite offering came from the people we call On One Software years ago when they produced a very innovative tool called Genuine Fractals. It was more CPU intensive, more demanding and required more user comprehension than Photoshop’s simpler to use, but not as good Image Resize. Over time, Adobe improved the code in their Image Resize section to where it was sufficiently good enough that customers slowed their rush to buy what I think was later called Perfect Resize.
Things changed again when Topaz released Gigapixel AI. I admit freely that anytime I see AI in the name of a product, my bullshit detector goes into alarm mode, because none of it is really AI. AI sounds better from a marketing perspective than “significantly improved fractal algorithms that consider user usage patterns based on invisible data gathering” That’s what it really does and it excels at it. I will say if asked, and when paid to do professional resizing, I will use Gigapixel AI as one of my primary tools. Is it better than Adobe’s offering? In my opinion yes indeed. Will Adobe catch up? Perhaps if they see that this is a market worth reclaiming.
The Code Base Dilemma
The longer a product has been in market and as the number of version releases increase, so does typically the code base. While developers can sometimes excise entire subsystems or code modules during a version up, this happens more rarely than you might think because removing a code portion, likely developed by others who have moved on and who certainly will not recall all the thinking processes during development creates a substantial risk of breaking stuff.
The last thing any software company wants is for a new release to turn into a firesale with every person on the Internet weighing in how the new version broke some or more critical pieces. There’s already enough of that, much of it coming from folks who do not know the software and who have never resorted to consulting the documentation. This fact does not mean that there are not issues, but no software company is going to douse themselves with accelerant and wait for someone to start throwing matches. Software companies have moved to subscription models to change their cashflow, and in so doing, have had to stop doing major releases and move to smaller more frequent incremental releases. In general users like this because they see improvements and new features much faster than in a perpetual license model, but it also means a lot less time for regression testing and ensuring that the new doesn’t clobber the old. Consequently, there is more improvement code than brand new innovative code.
There will always be users who will rant that all they need is a version ten years old. Fair enough, but software companies cannot worry about that to a great extent, because those customers have already declared that they aren’t going to spend more money on the product. They have to focus on maintaining market share and trying to grow it. Those old customers have already voted with their wallets and are customers no more.
The larger the existing code base is, the harder it is to innovate new things because of the risk in breaking something. If we use Photoshop as an example, remember that it was not designed for photographers. It was designed for designers and layout professionals to be able to work with existing photographs as part of a larger project. It still is, but perception is that Photoshop is primarily a photographic editor. I would say it is a very powerful pixel level photo editor but that is but a subset of what Photoshop can be used for. It is much richer, and thus much more complex than a simple application that does one thing exceptionally well. And consequently, there is a lot more there to break with something brand new added.
The Innovator’s Dilemma
Innovation means new. That could be a completely new methodology to accomplish a pre-existing goal, sky replacement being a reasonable example. Alternatively it could be a new method to do something that no larger audience was yelling about the need to do. Often this is where the creativity of great developers really get to soar. In large software companies, if profits can sustain them, these are often call black rooms or skunkworks, the same name given to aeronautical development shops. Skunkworks can deliver amazing stuff, but the public will never know of investments made that go nowhere, or burn up badly.
Any company doing innovation faces this challenge. Perhaps there is no formal skunkworks. Maybe the business is a number of enthusiastic developers with vision and a business plan. The whole thing could be a skunkworks. I worked closely with one of those companies a few years ago, literally a room off a much larger organization that built an amazing piece of software that did one thing better than anyone else. Eventually they shut the room down, because the return on the investment was nowhere near as good as their primary business and the challenges of customer support for clients who did not read manuals as well as some user interface challenges made it not worthwhile as a business proposition. Also, Adobe noticed and put some engineers to work on that specific problem and their former solution which was not very good, became sufficiently good enough that it meant that the customer base willing to spend another $100 to solve one specific problem vanished in a short period.
And what happens when something that is truly innovative and great is brought to market but just doesn’t attain lift off? This past week we had Scott Kelby on CommunityLIVE! and he talked briefly about an app that his company built called Light It! I am personally a real lighting geek, and look for the light most of all. I thought it was a fabulous app and bought in completely. I was however, in the minority, and the requirements of keeping the app going were a negative funding battle and the company did the right thing in winding it down. This happens a lot. A really great point idea, that doesn’t attain self sufficiency cannot go on.
Innovation is hard and not without risk. That doesn’t mean companies should not do it, and it behooves us as customers to understand the challenges so we can support makers when we encounter something we love, or are adamant about something missing.
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I'm Ross Chevalier, thanks for reading, watching and listening and until next time, peace.
