Adobe SkyReplace: beginning of the end?

Adobe has shown a preview of ‘SkyReplace’, a program that can replace a dull sky in a landscape photo by another sky with just a mouse click. You don’t even have to take photos of skies, because SkyReplace can search for a good replacement in its own database of images. What will this mean for photographers? For an amateur photographer this is mainly a matter of pride. Do you want to be ‘famous’ on Instagram with something that a computer generated? Do you really want to be a fake? That’s entirely up to you.

But it becomes scary when you are a professional photographer, because this is just the beginning. Computers now replace the sky, but soon they could also replace the landscape and every item in it. Some day soon there won’t be a need for photographers anymore. The locations will be fake, the models will be fake, the sky will be fake, the product will be fake, everything will be fake. Computers will be able to create every image you can possibly imagine from all the billions of stock images. The only photographers left will be a few event-photographers, like wedding photographers.

Maybe you should sell your camera while it’s still worth something…