Photoshop Isn't Evil Anymore

Overcoming a bad reputation is hard to do, and nearly impossible if you're a brand. In fact, there's an entire professional field dedicated to helping brands recover from major blows to company personas (thank you, crisis communication). It's not often that a brand can take its bad reputation like a bull by the horns and create a campaign that repositions the product successfully. But Adobe did it -- wonderfully.

The Creative Cloud company recently embarked on a project that enabled visual communications students to restore damaged photos belonging to the victims of Hurricane Harvey using Photoshop. LA-based agency Shareability created a campaign around the project. The work is beautiful and meaningful — and I promise you will cry when you see it. But it is also incredibly insightful. Here’s why.

The “Photo Restore" campaign has allowed Adobe to repossess the word Photoshop and redefine it as a tool to do good. In the age of body confidence characterized by Dove’s Real Beauty campaign, the crusade against image-altering editing softwares like Photoshop proved incredibly detrimental to the brand, as the general public began to associate the product with deception and manipulation.

Shareability clearly had a deep understanding of this problem that Adobe has been facing for years. The agency leveraged social content to highlight an aspect of Adobe’s corporate social responsibility that positioned Photoshop as the antithesis of what it has been made out to be: manipulative and destructive. By using Photoshop to restore the damaged photos, and documenting that restoration, Adobe repositioned Photoshop by redefining its purpose.