rcmnd

PhotoshopSoftware

by Adobe

Who uses, recommends or left Photoshop, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

7 people

Frank Lantz
Game designer and director of the NYU Game Center; made Universal Paperclips and writes Donkeyspace.
loved

I love Photoshop. I’m not ashamed to admit it. Photoshop is my jam. When it comes to software, Photoshop represents, for me, the gold standard of power + intuition.

His Donkeyspace newsletter, comparing Unity unfavorably to software he likes

2025-09-01·franklantz.substack.com ↗

Bob Nystrom
Programmer on the Dart language at Google and author of Game Programming Patterns; previously a game developer at EA.
loved

I've been using Photoshop since version 2.5, before it had layers or multiple undo, so I can't imagine editing images using anything else.

His Uses This interview, on the tools behind his game programming book and his Dart work.

2015-01-29·usesthis.com ↗

Jeffrey Zeldman
Web designer and writer; founded A List Apart and Happy Cog, co-founded the An Event Apart conference, and wrote Designing With Web Standards.
loved

I love Photoshop, and have been using it since version 2.0.

His written "Uses This" interview, from Happy Cog and A List Apart.

2009-11-13·usesthis.com ↗

Jenny Odell
Conceptual artist and writer, author of How to Do Nothing; teaches art at Stanford.
uses

Photoshop is my mainstay, for cutting things out and making animated GIFs.

The Setup (usesthis.com) interview, given while she was an artist in residence at Facebook.

2017-02-14·usesthis.com ↗

Eric Meyer
Web standards author and speaker; wrote the CSS: The Definitive Guide series and co-founded the An Event Apart conference.
uses

Adobe Photoshop gets some use, mostly when my business partner sends me designs and buttons and such to turn into markup and CSS, but also when I want to goof around a bit with images or process screenshots for my writing.

His written "Uses This" interview, describing a deliberately un-upgraded setup.

2011-03-08·usesthis.com ↗

Preshit Deorukhkar
Indian technology consultant and long-time writer; former editor of Beautiful Pixels, now writing at nuclearbits.com.
mixed

is an Incredible image & photo editor. I switched to it completely from Photoshop about a year ago and haven’t looked back.

His /uses page, which states it was last updated on October 12, 2025.

2025-10-12·nuclearbits.com ↗

Jakob Nielsen
Usability specialist and co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group; author of the Alertbox column on web usability.
mixed

On the other hand, I continue to find Photoshop unintuitive, though it has made me more productive to downgrade from the full edition to the more limited Elements edition. A good example of the less is more usability maxim.

The Setup (usesthis.com) interview: the Windows machines he runs usability studies on.

2009-06-13·usesthis.com ↗

What they also use

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.