7 ms·
PSD is not my favourite file format
- cromulent 5y agoPrevious discussion (2009): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=575122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=575122 The comment in context, in the code: https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/4fa3a6d609dd72b8493e52a68f316f7a02903276/XeePhotoshopLoader.m#L102 https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/4fa3a6d609dd72b8493e52a68f31...
- dang 5y agoAlso a couple months ago: PSD is not my favourite file format (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25946103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25946103 - Jan 2021 (103 comments)
- 0x76 5y agoWhy is the link to a seemingly unrelated blog instead of to the actual source?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lukepothier 5y agoRecent discussion on the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25946103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25946103
- HellDunkel 5y agoIts not just the file format, Photoshop is an abysmal product altogether. Features are basically the same as three decades ago. Linear 32bit workflow is broken to the point of unfixable. API basically not there. Automation laughable. GPU support not even worth mentioning. Referencing will freeze your computer for 1h a day when used in bigger projects. Apple is the only reason this piece of junk is still selling.
- antihero 5y agoWhat would you say is the superior alternative?
- TheRealPomax 5y agoDepends on what you actually want to do, because Photoshop is an all-trick-three-legged-pony, whereas the alternatives are all "we need to do X, and we need to do it well, let's actually make that application instead of something as insane as Photoshop". Krita, Clip Studio Paint, DxO, aseprite, there are tons of great options if you actually want an application that was written to be "what people who want to do X want in an application", instead of trying to be all things to all users.
- Jackim 5y agoAffinity Photo is probably the best option right now.
- HellDunkel 5y agoYes- Affinity Designer is also really nice for vector graphics. But they are just clones. If you are looking for „next-level“ check Nuke (The Foundry)- unless you are painting.
- thejohnconway 5y agoNuke seems to be a 2D-3D/video compositing application. That’s bringing in a huge amount of complexity if you’re trying to deal with 2D still images. It’s an Adobe After Effects competitor, surely?
- varispeed 5y agoOne would have hoped that GDPR would have required companies to publish documentation for the file formats they use, so that customers could move their project from one program to another. Unfortunately GDPR is only about the web (or that's what companies say when you ask for a file format and they refuse).
- namdnay 5y agoWhat does a privacy regulation have to do with an image file format???
- varispeed 5y agoGDPR requires companies to make moving personal data from one service to another easy. I understand that your files created in a program are your personal data, so it should be possible to make it compatible with other applications - this will also help with tackling walled gardens and anti-competitive behaviours. Given how many people downvoted my comment, I find it baffling, like you don't want to be able to have your personal data in an accessible format?
- tristanperry 5y ago> I understand that your files created in a program are your personal data Do you have a source for that? I'm not saying it's not (hence my question), but how would opening Photoshop, drawing a line, then saying this as a PSD count as personal data?
- varispeed 5y agoWhat would otherwise be the point of data portability? It's not exactly difficult to move your name, email address and IP to another provider, so why add legislation just for these things? There is a definition from the ICO site: “‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person”. So for example if you draw a line in Photoshop and by the way you drawn it someone can tell it was definitely you, then this is personal data. If you compose music and through its style it can be said that this is definitely something you made, this is also personal data and so on. That's why when you request data download for example from Facebook you get everything, not just your name, email and list of IP addresses you logged in from.
- KabirKwatra 5y agoTIFF works just as well in photoshop, preserving all layer data, while also being compatible with other viewers
- just_for_you 5y agoThat's due to Photoshop embedding a variant of the PSD format within the TIFF file, inside its own private TIFF tag. I'd argue that's even worse than just using PSD by itself. If you open a PSD-inside-TIFF file in an image editor that doesn't recognize that PSD data or which discards unknown TIFF tags when saving, you'll end up having the PSD data getting stripped simply by saving. Another problem is there might be a mismatch between the TIFF raster data and the embedded PSD document attached. For example someone could open the file in a PSD-unaware editor, make changes, and save the file only making changes to the TIFF raster data. Then later, when someone opens the file in Photshop, they won't see the changes because Photoshop ignored the newer TIFF raster data and used the older, embedded PSD document within it instead.
- thejohnconway 5y agoA lot of the discussion here seems to be about alternative applications to Photoshop. That isn’t really the point, as there are, indeed, quite a few pretty good ones. What we need is an open standard format that does the things PSD does, but in a sane way, and have all those alternatives use that format as their native file type (export/import isn’t going to cut it). Having all these alternatives using their own formats is crazy. As an artist, I want to be very confident my files will be readable in the future, even if companies or projects cease to exist.
- gnarbarian 5y agoYou're right. And it needs to have a text component so version control can be managed with things like git. Imagine binary blobs for the actual bitmaps but all operations on the bitmaps are sequentially translated to code, then simplified on save.
- shakna 5y agoThat would probably be OpenRaster [0]. The specification is still in progress, but Krita, KDE, GIMP are all working on it. As it is today, there's a half dozen programs that can already read the format. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRaster
- thejohnconway 5y agoRight. Which has been in the works for 15 years, only reached 0.5, and isn’t the native file format of anything(?). I wish the people writing image editing applications would take this more seriously, because to my mind the file format is more important than the application, but there you are.
- jakear 5y agoTrying to imagine a world where every text editor has their own proprietary character encoding and compatibility with other encodings is considered an extra... there’s something called UTF-8, but it’s been in development for 15 years without a stable release, and nobody supports it by default.
- TheRealPomax 5y agoWhat's the policy here, given that this "page" is just a straight up copy-paste of a code comment written over a decade ago (originally on Google Code, then to BitBucket, now on Github) The only thing this site did was copy their code comment verbatim, and then present it wrapped it in a million ads... (in effect: should this need [2009] added, given that this is just a repost that looks like it's just cashing in on other folk's content?)
- erikpukinskis 5y agoI guess they could change the link to https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/master/XeePhotoshopLoader.m#L108 https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/master/XeePhotoshopLoader.m#... and put the (2007). Although I'm somewhat inclined to give the Google juice to b3n.org since they went to the effort to dredge it up, and it appears to be a legitimate weblog. In the early days of the web this would've been a very normal use of a weblog and no one would have thought twice about it. I guess I would liken it to re-posting an image, except it's just copy/pasting the text. There is some degree of media creation in putting a frame around the specific block of text. Like a photograph. Screenshotting a block of text like this and putting it on Instagram would also be a normal thing to do. Although it would be shittier to disseminate because there could be no backlink.
- TheRealPomax 5y agoImagine it being a repost of an image, except now it has a million ads around it and it's clearly a "how can we get clicks to get dollars" =(
- PetrBrzyBrzek 5y agoJust for the folks who could find this interesting. We are making an SDK for reading, changing, and viewing PSD and other formats (Adobe Illustrator, Adobe XD, Sketch, and Figma) outside of design tools. I believe this can open new use cases such as design to code automation, linting design data, etc. We also have a universal design format that tries to unify as many features as possible. The SDK is going to be open sourced in a few weeks. Right now we offer REST API. You can check it here http://opendesign.avocode.com/ http://opendesign.avocode.com/. I'm trying to do "build in public" kind of marketing on my twitter account for this https://twitter.com/PetrBrzek https://twitter.com/PetrBrzek.
- redindian75 5y agoGreat effort. I had converted all my 1000s closed source Nikon NEF files into AdobeDNG for archival, thinking it was an open format, now I am stuck with Lightroom forever, as DNG is not as widely supported as I assumed.
- CharlesW 5y agoFWIW: If you embedded the original raw capture in the DNG file, you can use the Adobe DNG Converter application to extract that embedded raw capture.
- kjgkjhfkjf 5y agoIt's almost as if Adobe have no motives whatsoever to make the proprietary file format for their cash cow easy to use for those who would like to build competing products.
- setr 5y agoIt seems like they have no motivation to make it easy to use for themselves either.
- Someone1234 5y agoI buy that, but it also has to be a maintenance headache for them too. Like Adobe's tools are often improved but, it feels like from a user's perspective, that they're stacking kludge on kludge (similar to Oracle DB or Microsoft's Outlook). This may be unfair, for all I know Photoshop has a great codebase, but the bugs I've seen and experienced give me a bad impression.
- kjgkjhfkjf 5y agoAdobe has the money and prestige to be able to hire and retain very good people to work on Photoshop. I expect that the codebase is very high quality for one that is more than 30 years old.
- riffraff 5y agoI don't understand what the blog adds, I would rather the link pointed directly to https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/master/XeePhotoshopLoader.m#L108 https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/master/XeePhotoshopLoader.m#... which has been shared quite a lot in the past
- xyzelement 5y agoI am totally sympathetic to this rant from a developer that had to reverse engineer the format. But to play the devil's advocate... Over the past 31 years, PSD has been used by millions of professionals and amateurs alike to power everything from photo touch-up to web design and earning Adobe billions in the process. I would LOVE to be responsible for a "terrible" piece of technology that has achieved so much.
- juancn 5y agoPSD is old. Really old. It's no surprise it's a ball of hacks. New features, architecture changes, etc. likely accumulated an awful lot of cruft in the 30 or so years it has been in use. It may be time to create a portable format that holds the same information than a PSD (but using a saner structure).