Believe me, Photoshop, you’re amazing. The things you can do with the Curves control, with channels, with compositing, with custom filters… you still take my breath away.

But lately we’ve been getting on each other’s nerves. Come on, admit it: you feel like I don’t appreciate you when I fire up the world’s most comprehensive image editing software just to crop some logo I found on the web. And I feel like you’re being too needy when you demand so much startup time, memory and processor overhead just to adjust the contrast on a photo.

Look, you need to know: there’s… there’s someone else.

Their name? Their name doesn’t matter. What matters is… okay, fine. It’s Snipshot. Are you happy?

Yes, they’re from Vancouver. But that’s not why I’ve been using them.

It’s because Snipshot lets me do the kind of simple, nimble image manipulation I so often need… and do it without opening anything but my browser. Yeah – it’s a web application, and it’s free.

You know what? I can install a little bookmarklet in my browser bar, and any time I’m on a web page with a graphic I want to use, I click on the bookmarklet, select the image and start editing. It’s fast and easy, and free.

Imagine combining that with Flickr. Do you know how liberating that is? Do you know how young and alive that makes me feel?

I’m sorry, that was cruel.

Listen, Snipshot isn’t perfect. For instance, I’d love an easier way of taking screenshots of entire web pages, and while I can use Snipshot with a service like Browsershots, it would be a lot cooler if there was something that could automatically grab whatever was on my clipboard and edit it.

And Snipshot is fast and easy, but nowhere near as smart and sophisticated as you are. I’m not even talking about your filters, type handling, layers, channels and effects – you handle far bigger pictures, with far more file formats, with far more precision than Snipshot could ever hope to. This year, anyways.

So this isn’t goodbye, Photoshop. It’s au revoir. I’ll still be bringing you out for the big and medium-sized jobs all the time. It’s just the little stuff where I’ll be using Snipshot… although granted, it’s little stuff that comes up a whole lot. And that kind of mundane work is beneath a piece of software as big and powerful as you are.

No, I’m not being patronizing. I mean it. We can still be friends, right? Good.

What, right now? Um, actually, now isn’t good for me. I have this little GIF that needs cropping, so I thought I’d, uh, use Snipshot and…

Photoshop? Hello?