Adobe Photoshop was once the most essential ingredient in every photographer's digital toolbox, but it's looking increasingly like a dinosaur in a new era of digital photography that rewards speed and convenience over polish.

On Tuesday, Adobe introduced a major upgrade of Photoshop, its powerhouse photo-editing tool and the flagship product in its Creative Suite 3 collection of digital media applications. The upgrade, the first in three years, will be available in April.

Just five years ago, anyone who owned a digital camera also needed a copy of Photoshop if they were to do more than resize images and remove red eye. But Adobe's once-killer app has been rendered largely obsolete by a new breed of applications built exclusively for the vast and growing legions of digital photographers.

"Photoshop has been an essential part of my workflow," said Lane Hartwell, a pro photographer. "But actually I use less of it now.... I can do most everything I want without opening Photoshop."

The declining prices of high-end digital cameras and the popularity of online photo-sharing websites like Flickr and Photobucket have resulted in an explosion of digital photography hobbyists.

These serious camera hounds are constantly snapping pictures, but unlike their analog brethren of yesteryear who built darkrooms under the stairs, they're not printing out and framing the results. Instead, they're sending their snaps straight to the web.

The post-processing requirements of images bound for Flickr are significantly less than those being prepped for print work, which demands high image resolution, complicated color matching and other fine adjustments. This lower threshold for detailed tweaking means that web photographers have less of a need for Photoshop's post-production might.

Newer workflow management tools like Adobe's Bridge and Photoshop Lightroom, as well as Apple's Aperture – all of which allow photographers to prep batches of multiple image files quickly – better suit the needs of today's shutterbug.

"We've recognized for a long time that we need to evolve in the direction of being much more multiple-image savvy," acknowledges John Nack, Adobe's senior product manager for Photoshop.

To that end, Adobe recently launched Lightroom, a competitor to Aperture, that is built exclusively for the digital photographer's work flow. It only handles image files and includes database-driven sorting and organizing tools not found in Photoshop's Bridge.

"A lot of photographers are going to come to spend the bulk of their time, in terms of selecting images and also editing them, in Lightroom," says Nack.

Noah Kalina, a professional photographer whose Everyday photo montage video is one of the most viewed clips on YouTube, says the number one reason to upgrade to Creative Suite 3 has nothing to do with Photoshop.

"The real improvement is Bridge," he says. "It's much faster, and the camera raw conversion is much better."

Given the rise in popularity of photo-sharing websites, it's surprising that neither Bridge nor Photoshop ships with any built-in online sharing tools. However, Bridge does have a revamped plug-in architecture that will allow outside developers to build tools to leverage online services – much like the Flickr plug-in for Apple's Aperture.

Laughing Squid's Scott Beale, one the web's consummate shutterbugs, says he works almost entirely in Aperture.

"It saves me a lot of time," he says. "I can process my images and upload directly to the web with the Flickr export plug-in."

"There's no need for Photoshop unless you're doing a tremendous amount of post-processing," says Beale.

Adobe sees Bridge and Photoshop as complimentary. Bridge handles basic edits, batch processing and organizational tasks, while Photoshop is the more refined editing program for those who want to go further with their images.

Indeed, Photoshop has always been developed and marketed as the ultimate toolbox for digital imaging professionals. The application will continue to serve this need, even if it's being used less and less by photo enthusiasts shooting exclusively for the web.

"There are plenty of cases where people really want to fine-tune an image," says Nack. "That's where Photoshop really shines."

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