The problem is that there is a whole industry created around Photoshop, all artists use it, it's taught in every college/course, and there are a million books written about it.
For a startup to compete against that momentum would be extremely difficult. There is also considerable competition from open source/free programs like GIMP and Paint.Net. Pixelmator seems like it's doing well, though.
I think the opportunities lie more in creating niche tools. Just look at all the tools created the last few years for photographers, the top one perhaps being Adobe Lightroom. It contains most of the image editing tools from PS that a photographer needs, but is built more around the photographer's workflow.
> For a startup to compete against that momentum would be extremely difficult.
I think it would be very difficult for a startup to make a replacement photoshop, but that shouldn't really be anyone's goal (photoshop already exists), and with actual novel ideas about how editing should be done, I think there are quite reasonable opportunities: it's always difficult to make quality software, but image editors and their market aren't inherently worse in this respect than email clients, say, or word processors, or many types of games, etc.
> considerable competition from open source/free programs like GIMP and Paint.Net
Really? I don't know anyone who uses these for serious work. I understand the GIMP gets used in particular niches, such as among free software ideologues, but I don't think competition from these would be a real problem for anyone trying to make a serious image editor.
> It contains most of the image editing tools from PS that a photographer needs
Not really. Most Lightroom users also use Photoshop, and Lightroom's goals as a product are completely different from Photoshop's (image organization, selection, comparison, rather than careful editing): they're complementary, not competitors.
I use The GIMP for serious work - production of advertising materials for print and for any non-vector elements of website designs. The quality demands (see eg http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/ ) seem so low in the print media industry that most graphic designers probably aren't using CS4 to any great advantage.
The only times I've needed anything else have been because the printers say "we only accept a PSD" or "files must be from Corel 9" or whatever. They always take something else in the end. Actually it's more often I need to use AI files and Inkscape's not doing to bad on that.
Exact colour match (pantones, etc.) doesn't matter for me; my target market couldn't generally care less that the shade is ever so slightly out and in most print situations the colour is either off at print (newspapers) or off by the point of viewing (eg magazine in a rack that's faded for a month).
When you say “production of advertising materials” what do you mean? You work for an ad agency? Or you sometimes wear a “design hat” in addition to your other roles at your company? Because if you were spending 40 hours a week on design work, buying and learning and using Photoshop instead of the GIMP would pay for itself quite quickly.
I should have been clearer. I'm sure there exist people who use the GIMP, even though I don’t know them. I do not, however, think the GIMP provides “considerable competition” in the image editing space by any reasonable definition of “considerable”. I don’t have any solid numbers of my own, and really have no idea how I’d look for any, but if we just judge by, for instance, relative numbers of books offered for sale about each product, Photoshop has a simply crushing market-share advantage.
> quality demands seem so low in the print media industry
I don’t work in print media (I’m a political science student), but this seems like a pretty cheap shot. One could take similar shots at programmers, musicians, scientists, etc.
I don’t work in print media (I’m a political science student), but this seems like a pretty cheap shot.
It's my opinion. There seems to be a lot more typos and grammatical errors that should have been caught in proof stages, a lot more poor "it'll do" type photo-shopping than in the past. This may be because I've become more focussed and more observant with respect to print media given that I'm using it for inspiration for online work and to suggest what the zeitgeist might be.
Incidentally, as you note, this probably is true in other fields too.
Probably, but PS users are notoriously conservative about the behavior and interface of the features they use, and more tolerant of new additions.
For a competitor to be successful, it would likely just have to copy PS. I'm not sure cleaning up the UI would work for a startup beyond just unifying the sliders and widgets and buttons under a common scheme. But they'd all have to be in the same place and do the same stuff.
(it's not like the space isn't full of competitors right now anyway)
