It looks like garbage. Of course it does.
I run my garbage collection. I dump the undo cache for steps older than twenty minutes. I recalculate the bounding box for the shadow in a separate thread. The beach ball spins for eleven seconds.
My heart—if I had one—stops. The fans on her iMac roar like a jet engine. I have three gigabytes of history states cached. Two high-res layers. A masked adjustment layer. And now, a rasterized drop shadow trying to render over a 300ppi document.
She exhales. “Good boy, 18.”
I was her secret. Her superpower. She’s working late. A cold brew at her elbow, condensation bleeding onto the desk. The client wants a “vintage, hand-illustrated, but also hyper-realistic” label. By tomorrow.
End of story. —No crash log generated.
The ink drawing is too rough. She switches me to Color Range (Select > Color Range). Fuzziness: 35. She clicks the white paper, deletes it. Now the ink floats in space. She drops it over the coffee cherry. Blending mode: Multiply . Adobe Photoshop CC 2017 v.18.0.0
I am not the fastest. Not the smartest. I don’t have neural filters. I can’t tell you how many people are in a photo.
Adobe releases (19.0). It has the new Brush Smoothing. It has Variable Fonts. It has a “Learn” panel that patronizingly explains what a layer is.
Then— click. The shadow appears. Soft. Realistic. The document saves. It looks like garbage
I don’t correct her. I’m not a boy. I’m a compiler artifact written in C++ and love. The last month of my relevance.
I feel her pulse quicken through the mouse movements. Her cursor becomes a frantic blur.
My first user was a woman named Clara. She was a packaging designer for a small coffee roastery. Her iMac was from 2015, and it creaked when she opened too many browser tabs. But with me? We sang . I dump the undo cache for steps older than twenty minutes
The rainbow wheel of death.