You wouldn't drive your truck around town in reverse gear, would you? That's a bit how photographers feel about using Adobe Photoshop. It's a really nice heavy-duty commercial vehicle; there's just this little gearbox problem.

Adobe's star app has industrial-strength ability to handle huge files. It's dead stable and almost never crashes. It is decently color-managed. It runs on both Macs and PCs with identical features. It can read files from mostly any pro camera under the sun. It has zillions of features. It's wonderful.

In fact many photographers have just this one app and do mostly everything with it. It's that good.

But, but, but… it's stuck in reverse gear. I am not talking about the interface being a bit clunky here; I mean it just plain points the wrong way. And that's hugely annoying when you sometimes spend 60 hours a week in Photoshop.

Photoshop is more than an app; it's a platform. Click here to read more.

To a photographer as naive as I am, it looks like the original target audience of Photoshop was the publishing trade. However, let me stress the distinction: Publishing is not about creating photographs or imagery, it's about using them, about getting them out the door quickly and effectively.

In other words, prepress actors mostly process files "globally." They will resize the whole thing, maybe crop it, change the sharpness of the whole thing. Detail is untouched.

Now that's exactly what you expect in prepress, because the submitted image is content, and ideally content is not altered but only repackaged by the publishing process.

So, the image gets molded to the right density, cut to shape, is embedded in some bigger container and overlaid by text, and shipped out to press. Hey presto, cover photo's done, let's move on to the next issue!

Photographers live upstream of the publishing trade. They deal in content, which means creative process and attention to detail. So their interventions on a file are typically both intrusive and delicate: retouch a pimple, remove some stray hair, silkily smooth out a large expanse of skin, saturate the lipstick, blur out parts of the background, underline the texture of the clothing.

As digital imaging evolves, so does Photoshop. Click here to read more.

In fashion photography, you arrange the model during the shoot, and you rearrange her afterwards while retouching. Yes, the real key to the glamorous perfection characteristic of pro photography is often retouching.

And when you go up the food chain to the more expensive campaigns and upmarket publications, retouching budgets become very consequential.

The retoucher's current headache is achieving the subtle local retouch of a file with Photoshop's global tools. The easiest route is often to create a layer that has the required effect—say, blur or sharpness—and then paint it into the final image at the appropriate places using a history brush or opacity effect.

The alternative is to create a selection, say of the lips, and then apply a filter or effect, such as saturation, to this selection, say to redden the lips.

Now, when I wish to make a model's lips look redder, I would greatly prefer to simply paint them over with a "saturation brush". I would like to be able to do the same for most filters that need to be selectively applied, such as, blur, or noise reduction.

In other words, the Photoshop concept of "select first, then filter" is exactly the opposite of what a retoucher wants to do. A retoucher wants to choose a type of filter first—like blur or saturate—and then apply it topically, dabbing it in at the right spots with a paint brush.

The Photoshop interface is going backwards compared with the way you want to work. As a result, every move you make has to be meticulously prepared, and you lose the ability to work intuitively. A lot of time gets wasted, and you get tired.

I think you can see where I am heading here. Now that Photoshop has more and more photographer users, it's time the interface took their oh-so-eccentric needs into account.

I will indicate one more pet annoyance before I conclude: the fact that you cannot manipulate a file at more than one depth and resolution. For example: I read in an original 16-bit depth RAW file image of 16 megapixels, and retouch it a bit in the Adobe RGB color space. Here, saving the huge retouched TIFF version is easy.

But I also usually need a client preview Web or e-mail copy in addition to my working copy. For this, I have to fill in the boxes to resize the image with the correct interpolation (sharper), change modes to 8 bits, convert the image to the sRGB working space, choose a JPEG compression ratio, find the right folder, and ah, yes finally save it. It takes too long. (Read: Forever.)

Pardon my frustration, but using Photoshop as a photographer is slow and painful, like driving a truck in reverse. Oh, and did I tell you I don't even have a driver's license?

Edmund Ronald has a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, but he is currently on a sabbatical as a photographer in Paris.