Adobe Answers Your Questions on AI, Controversies, and Photography

The PetaPixel Podcast

Over the past few weeks, we've been compiling the questions you want Adobe to answer related to its push into AI, recent controversies, and photography in general. We had a chance to sit down with Maria Yap, Adobe's Vice President of Digital Imaging, to give the company a chance to respond.
For over an hour, Chris Niccolls, Jordan Drake, and Jaron Schneider chatted with Yap and presented her with a range of inquiries from the whole "skip the photoshoot" debacle, pricing and subscription strategy, Lightroom performance, and more. While Yap answers many of those in the podcast, she also wanted to be sure to give detailed answers in text form to a few that stood out as needing more context.
You can read those here: http://petapixel.com/2024/08/15/adobe-answers-your-questions-on-ai-controversies-and-photography-the-petapixel-podcast
We expect to speak with Adobe more frequently moving forward, so more questions and ideas for topics to discuss are welcome!
Check out PetaPixel Merch: store.petapixel.com/
We use Riverside to record The PetaPixel Podcast in our online recording studio.
We hope you enjoy the podcast and we look forward to hearing what you think. If you like what you hear, please support us by subscribing, liking, commenting, and reviewing! Every week, the trio go over comments on YouTube and here on PetaPixel, but if you’d like to send a message for them to hear, you can do so through SpeakPipe.

In This Episode

• 00:00 - Intro
• 03:28 - Meet Maria Yap, Adobe's Vice President of Digital Imaging
• 06:20 - Discussing the "skip the photoshoot" ad
• 11:04 - Can Adobe use AI to make metadata tagging easier?
• 13:27 - Does Adobe plan to update its TOS to allow boudoir photographers to use AI tools, or are they out of luck?
• 16:37 - Is Adobe going to leverage NPUs better so sending AI requests to the cloud is not necessary?
• 21:13 - When are we going to get proper multi-core and graphics card acceleration?
• 28:05 - Will Lightroom on iPad ever have feature parity to Lightroom on desktop?
• 46:34 - When is Lightroom Classic tethering support coming to Apple Silicon? Are you working to improve the stability of tethering on Windows?
• 47:17 - Why hasn’t there been any significant improvement or revision to the Lightroom import process?
• 48:35 - Could there be a Photoshop or Lightroom "lite"?
• 51:43 - Would Adobe consider a "build your own" or a la carte bundle plan of apps?
• 53:41 - How does Adobe ensure that its decision-making remains independent and user-centric?
• 55:14 - How does Adobe plan to improve communication and transparency with its users?
• 59:43 - How does Adobe ensure that customer value remains central to its business strategy?
• 1:03:19 - The broken promise of Lightroom as perpetual software forever.
• 1:06:12 - Adobe's stance on AI, imagery, and what is a photo?