There is a very specific genre of content that has taken over Instagram and TikTok lately, and if you use any kind of software at all, you have probably seen it. Someone opens a screen recording of Photoshop, or Excel, or Premiere, or whatever tool of the week, and they say something like “stop doing it the beginner way” before showing you two methods side by side. On the left, the simple thing everyone already knows how to do. On the right, a longer sequence of clicks through menus you have never opened, ending in the exact same result. And that is the part that gets me. Not the format itself, which is fine as a concept, but the fact that so many of these videos never actually establish why the second method is better. They just assume that more steps automatically means more expertise, and that if something looks more complicated on screen, it must be the “real” way professionals do it. Meanwhile the simple way, the one that took four seconds and got you to the exact same edited image with the exact same result, gets treated like a rookie mistake.
I want to be clear that I am not against this format existing. Some of these videos are genuinely useful. There are real cases where the quick and dirty method gets you eighty percent of the way there and breaks down the moment your task gets slightly more complicated, and in those cases showing the more robust approach is a public service. If you are removing backgrounds from fifty product photos a week and you are manually tracing around each one with the lasso tool, someone showing you batch processing through actions and Select Subject is doing you a genuine favor. That is a case where the beginner way is a trap, because it works fine for one image and completely falls apart at scale. The pro way there earns its title because it produces something the beginner way structurally cannot, whether that is speed, repeatability, or a result that survives edge cases the simple method quietly ignores. Nobody is annoyed by that video. That video is good content because it is teaching you something you did not already have access to.
What I am annoyed by is the version of this format where there is no actual gap in capability between the two methods, and the entire premise of the video rests on the assumption that if you did not use six menus you did not really do the task. You want to duplicate a layer. The beginner way is you click the layer, hit the keyboard shortcut, done. The “pro way” in one of these videos was going into the layers menu, choosing duplicate layer from the dropdown, naming it in a popup box, and confirming with a separate click, as though this produced some different, more legitimate copy of the layer. Same result. Same file. Same duplicated layer sitting in the same document. The only difference was the number of clicks and how impressive it looked on a fifteen second clip. Who cares. Genuinely, who cares if I got there through the “beginner” shortcut if the output is identical. This is the entire disagreement I have with the trend, and it is not really about Photoshop specifically, Photoshop is just the current victim. It is about a broader idea that has crept into productivity content generally, which is that complexity is being used as a stand in for competence, when the two things are not the same and are sometimes actually inversely related.
Think about what “pro” is supposed to mean in any actual professional context. If you watch someone who is genuinely excellent at their job, whether that is a chef, a mechanic, a programmer, an editor, whoever, one of the most consistent traits you will notice is that they do not add steps for no reason. They are ruthless about eliminating unnecessary motion. A great cook is not using four pans when one will do the job just as well, they are not because using four pans looks more like “real cooking,” they use four pans when the dish actually requires it and one pan when it does not, and they can tell you exactly why in either case. A senior engineer is not writing more complicated code to prove they understand more design patterns, the best engineers I have worked with write the simplest possible solution that solves the actual problem, and they treat unnecessary complexity as a liability, not a flex. Expertise, real expertise, usually moves in the direction of simplicity once you actually understand a system well enough to know what is load bearing and what is decoration. The people who add complexity for its own sake are very often the ones who are still building their identity around looking skilled rather than being efficient, and I think a huge amount of this Photoshop content, and content like it, is made by people who have confused those two things, or worse, understand the difference and are exploiting it anyway because they know it performs well.
And that gets at the actual root of why this trend exists in the first place, which has less to do with software education and more to do with how content gets rewarded on these platforms. Nobody scrolls past a video and stops because it shows them something they already fully understand. “Here is a way to duplicate a layer that works exactly the same as the way you already do it” is not a hook, there is no tension there, there is nothing to resolve. But “stop doing it wrong” is a hook. “You have been doing this the beginner way this whole time” creates a tiny spike of anxiety, a little worry that you have been missing out on something, and that anxiety is what makes people stop scrolling and watch the full fifteen seconds to find out what they supposedly did not know. The format is not built to answer the question “what is actually the better method,” it is built to answer the question “what will make someone stop scrolling,” and those two goals only sometimes overlap. When they overlap, you get genuinely useful content, like the batch background removal example. When they do not overlap, you get someone manufacturing a hierarchy between two methods that produce an identical file, purely because the manufactured hierarchy is more engaging than the truth, which is that both ways are fine and you should just use whichever one you remember how to do.
There is also something a little insidious about how this format trains people to feel about their own competence with software. If you are someone who is not deeply familiar with Photoshop, and you watch fifty of these videos over a few months, you start to internalize a general sense that you are doing almost everything wrong, even when you are not. You start to believe that there is always a hidden, more sophisticated layer underneath whatever you are doing, and that not knowing about it is a personal failing rather than a completely reasonable outcome of the fact that Photoshop has an enormous number of features that ninety percent of users will never need. This creates a kind of low grade imposter syndrome around tools that are supposed to just help you get work done. People start second guessing basic actions, wondering if there is a “real” way to crop an image or adjust a curve that they already know how to do perfectly well, and that self doubt gets manufactured entirely by content that had no actual pedagogical reason to exist beyond generating engagement through implied inadequacy. It is a strange thing to do to people over something as mundane as duplicating a layer or resizing a canvas, but the emotional mechanics are the same ones used in a lot of other insecurity driven content, just applied to editing software instead of appearance or lifestyle.
I also think there is a kind of magician’s trick happening visually in a lot of these videos that makes the pro way look more impressive than it is, independent of whether it actually is more impressive. Screen recordings compress time and hide friction in a way that live usage does not. When you watch someone navigate four menus in a fifteen second clip, cut together smoothly, with confident cursor movement and no hesitation, it looks slick. It looks like fluency. It looks like the kind of thing only someone who really knows the software could pull off. But that fluency is often just familiarity with the video editing process, not necessarily fluency with Photoshop, and the actual time cost of that four menu method, if you tried to replicate it yourself without having memorized where every button is, would probably take you longer than the one keystroke “beginner” method took to begin with. The visual medium itself is doing a lot of the persuasive work here, making complexity look like mastery, when in a live, unedited context, that same complexity might just look like someone who took the long way around for no reason.
None of this means the underlying tools do not have real depth worth learning, because they absolutely do. Photoshop has smart objects that let you scale and transform images non-destructively without ever touching the original pixels, which matters enormously the moment you need to revise a design later. It has frequency separation for retouching that can smooth skin texture while preserving fine detail in a way basic healing brush use never will. It has actions and batch processing that can apply an entire complex edit sequence to hundreds of images unattended. These are genuinely pro features in the sense that they unlock outcomes a beginner approach cannot replicate at all, not just a slower version of the same outcome. When someone makes a video about those features, I am fully on board, because the video is actually teaching capability, not just performing it. The problem is never with showing advanced features. The problem is with framing something as advanced purely because it involves more steps, when the actual defining trait of something being advanced should be that it does something the simple method genuinely cannot.
I think the fix here, if content creators wanted to actually fix it, is a pretty simple internal test they could apply before making one of these videos. Does the “pro way” produce a materially different or better result than the beginner way. Does it save meaningful time at any realistic scale, not just look faster in a sped up clip. Does it unlock a capability that the simple method structurally does not have access to, like non-destructive editing, batch automation, or a level of control a basic tool genuinely cannot offer. If the answer to all of those is no, and the two methods produce a functionally identical output, then the honest video is not “here is the pro way,” it is “here is another way to do the exact same thing, use whichever one you remember, it does not matter.” That is a less exciting video, sure, but it is an honest one, and honestly, some of the best productivity advice is genuinely just “it does not matter, stop overthinking it,” which is not a message this genre of content is ever going to want to sell you, because that message does not get watched all the way through and it does not make anyone feel like they just learned an insider secret.
At the end of the day I think what bothers me most is not any individual video, because any individual dumb Photoshop tutorial is a completely inconsequential thing to be annoyed about, and I am aware of that. What bothers me is the broader pattern it represents, which shows up far beyond editing software. It shows up in coding content that frames the more convoluted, more clever solution as superior to the boring, obvious one that does the exact same job with less risk of bugs. It shows up in cooking content that treats extra steps as inherently more legitimate, even when a shortcut produces a plate that tastes identical. It shows up in fitness content, in finance content, basically anywhere someone can frame “simple” as synonymous with “wrong” and “complicated” as synonymous with “expert,” regardless of whether that framing has any relationship to actual outcomes. Real expertise is not measured in number of steps. It is measured in whether you get the result you need, reliably, without wasting effort you did not need to spend. Sometimes that takes six menus. Most of the time, especially for the kind of everyday tasks these videos are actually showing, it does not, and pretending otherwise for the sake of a hook is not teaching people to be more skilled, it is just teaching them to distrust the parts of their own competence that were already working fine.
