Did Adobe Miss a Turn?

Adobe’s history with imaging dates far back, and I remember using the original Photoshop alpha version back in the late 1980’s with a Barneyscan (I believe it was Photoshop version 0.65 that was labeled as the Barneyscan application I was using). Photoshop had at its core the mission to compose and edit image data at the pixel level, something that has been expanded on ad finitum ever since. Perhaps Creative Suite diverted Photoshop a bit, as we ended up with features that helped support things like drawing and text, but the core pixel-pushing abilities have pretty much continuously been tweaked, refined, added to, and given more performance through all 27 major variants of Photoshop. If you ignore the “graphic designer flotsam” that’s been added, Photoshop remains a pretty wicked advanced photo editing platform. The subject of my headline, though, is not Photoshop, but Lightroom. A product I also have deep roots with, as I was involved in a lot of the early discussion and was a beta…