7 ms·

Incredible that the UX is still generally the same. What a vision the original engineers had. I am annoyed today though every time I open the app. The only tim

by TIPSIO 2y ago

Incredible that the UX is still generally the same. What a vision the original engineers had. I am annoyed today though every time I open the app. The only time it has ever felt snappy on desktop was a sweet period when the MacBook Pro M1 first came out and Adobe Photoshop had a Silicon beta out. Those days are long gone and we are slow again.

darknavi 2y ago
I still use an old CS6 license and while it's snappy in the app, it still takes its time to boot.
aredox 2y ago
Is it because the UX is good or because changing it is impossible without the users rebelling en masse?
- biofox 2y ago
  No point fixing something that isn't broken (someone please tell Microsoft)
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >No point fixing something that isn't broken But how do you know a UX isn't broken, when you've only seen one iteration of it you're whole life and have nothing else to compare it to? Kind of like Plato's Cave Allegory. You have to try new things, and if you see them fail, then you know which one was the best.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      "try" doesn't imply "ship to millions of customers" And sometimes there's good enough and you should leave it alone. QWERTY isn't optimal but it's not very far from it.
      - Rinzler89 2y ago
        But if you're not gonna ship it to all your millions of users and receive the outrage as feedback, how will you ever know if it works or not? A/B testing to a few users only works in web-app front-ends, not in professional tools where all single end-user releases need to look and act exactly the same. Shipping to only a handful of users wasn't a thing in the era of "Gold CD" releases, and even in the era of the internet updates, nobody will want to take part in A/B testing and end up with a different Photoshop UX than what his colleague is using, so you either ship to all or none. So it seems Photoshop's UI is more of a cause of inertia and resistance to change, rather than nailing right the first time.
        marginalia_nu 2y ago
        A/B testing does very little to improve any UX. It's got merits in performance optimization, where the implementation differs but the contract is static between A and B, but with user interfaces, it generally leads to pessimizations as usage is not proportional to usefulness. The rare exception is single-purpose interfaces where increasing one singular interaction is an end in itself, e.g. a marketing page, but that's a pretty unique case that is very far removed from a productivity tool.
        Dylan16807 2y ago
        You bring in testers and UI experts, and you have the experts watch the testers. Shipping to mass market is a bad way to get feedback.
        Karunamon 2y ago
        Are there such a thing as UI experts anymore? It seems like we only have designers left, and I am none too thrilled about their influence.
      - eimrine 2y ago
        Qwerty is a significant brake in learning English from scratch.
    - beau_g 2y ago
      Use gimp, add a new layer, paste something into it, and resize it, then you will know
      - frankharv 2y ago
        How about PhotoShop's Magic Lasso? I have not found many tools that work as well and make productivity great.
  - navjack27 2y ago
    Hard to do when the power users for the most part try to block analytics and the insider testers have very fluid workflows and there is no such thing as death by a thousand papercuts to them. They aren't getting the signal because the people that should be telling them the signal are actively denying sending the signal.
    - eimrine 2y ago
      Аre you saying this about OS which shows ads in Start menu?
  - turnsout 2y ago
    In Photoshop there are at least three completely different dialog boxes [0] for saving an image as a JPEG, each with totally different UI widgets and functionality. They simply refuse to revise anything in the interface—they just keep adding. It's the software equivalent of hoarding. [0] Save/Save as, Export As, Save for Web (Legacy)
    - bombcar 2y ago
      I'm ride-or-die on Save for Web (Legacy), it's the way to go by far. Now if they'd just integrate the tinypng plugin that was deprecated in 2023 - https://help.tinify.com/help/deprecation-of-the-photoshop-plugin https://help.tinify.com/help/deprecation-of-the-photoshop-pl...
      - turnsout 2y ago
        Same—I just wish they'd either drop the "(Legacy)" and admit that they can never remove it, or add those same features to the Export dialog!
    - reddalo 2y ago
      How long has the Save for Web been "Legacy"? I feel like it's been there for a long time.
      - jaredwy 2y ago
        I was the engineer that added that string. Since adding that string... I joined the photoshop team officially. Spent maybe 5 years there. I have left adobe. I Had a year and a half sabbatical. Now writing this comment. It's been a while.
        turnsout 2y ago
        Ha, comments like this are why I love hn!
      - MontagFTB 2y ago
        The intent was to direct customers to the new “Export As” experience, which was a newer code base and handled some things SFW did not. Enough people couldn’t leave SFW behind though, and it’s been Legacy ever since. Anecdotally, SFW is the result of converting Adobe ImageReady into a plugin. When IR was originally created, many of its sources were split off from Photoshop to get it off the ground. So now we have two variants of “the same” sources for many files- one evolving in Photoshop, and the other frozen in time in Save for Web.
- kjellsbells 2y ago
  I cant speak for all PS users, but it's not that it is a special UX so much that it is embedded in the muscle memory of the user community, and that degree of familiarity contributes mightily to people being able to get work done quickly. The closest example I cam think of, which people inside Adobe most certainly know about, is the failed attempts by Quark Xpress to update their product in the late 90s/early 00s, which led to them losing a 95% market share position to Adobe InDesign. You do not mess with the tools that a loud and creative community rely upon to get their jobs done.
  - philistine 2y ago
    The only way Adobe can get out of this conundrum is by announcing a transition to a new interface, finding ways to incentivize schools to teach the new interface, while keeping the old one around for as long as possible to give time for the oldies to slowly retire. We're talking decades.
    - basch 2y ago
      The user interface is extremely customizable. You can have a default layout and still keep legacy ones around. You wouldn’t need to kill the legacy layout unless you are removing the cuetomizability.
  - brazzledazzle 2y ago
    Adobe actually changed a bunch of shortcuts at least a couple of points between photoshop 7 and creative cloud. I remember how I'd developed muscle memory that took a bit to fully overwrite.
    - tambourine_man 2y ago
      There are settings to revert them all
      - brazzledazzle 2y ago
        Yeah but I wanted to maintain "compatibility" with others using the software whether for discussion's sake or so I can hop on their workstation and not have to think about changing anything. Turning those legacy settings on and having that survive restarts could be flaky/buggy. I got the impression keeping that functionality well tested wasn't the highest thing on their development priorities.
- BeFlatXIII 2y ago
  Considering how many complaints about GIMP UI being bad with no more substance than "Just compare it to Photoshop!", I'd bet 65% on option B.
- bufferoverflow 2y ago
  As someone, who used Photoshop a lot, the UI/UX is good. It would be pretty hard to make it significantly better. And yes, even if you somehow made it better, many users would complain, because they have muscle memory of the UX, and are extremely efficient with it.
- maxglute 2y ago
  It would be curious to see UX timeline of what PS influenced, and what influenced it, in mouse age. A lot of desktop derivative products seem to hold on PS-like UI, it's all very mutually reinforcing. I'm not sure what iPad UX is like. I remember autocad products also adding ribbon system and it wasn't end of the world, but also very few ppl that I know end up migrating. Part of me feels like it's... either very optimal for masses to learn because very few PSers (outside of photography) I know have professional peripherals (some have hotkey stickers on keycaps), vs lots of other creative fields have specialized decks/hardware to make streamline workflow. Like part of me feels like there is a better physical hardware implmentation to manipulate all the curves/histograms other than moving around with mouse, but mouse+keyboard is... good enough.
  - marbletiles 2y ago
    A lot of PS 1.0's UI (2-col toolbox on the left etc) owes its heritage to MacPaint, which was a launch app for the Mac. Even the iPad shares keyboard shortcuts set by the original Mac, though has considerably broken away in other aspects.
- bonestamp2 2y ago
  When Photoshop went subscription I bought the full version of CS6 (or whatever the last non-subscription version was). It was very expensive. Then when that stopped working on Mac, I tried using every reasonable competitor, paid for several. I'm sure some of them are very competent tools, but it was a nightmare trying to learn a new UI. I bit the bullet and started paying the subscription.
grishka 2y ago
Just downgrade? I still use some version from 2022, the first M1-compatible one that was cracked. Still as snappy as it was 2 years ago.
ompogUe 2y ago
Not sure if you worked with it in the early '90's, but on a Mac w/4MB of RAM, it took ~5-10 minutes to undo a Guassian Blur. The pain was real. The way to go back then was the SGI Indigo w/96MB. It worked best for me in the late '90's on a 9500, and even then needed an entire GB of RAM.
- alamortsubite 2y ago
  Ha! In the early '90's the way to go was Live Picture [1]! Your undo would have been instantaneous! Unfortunately, Live Picture only ran on Mac. Photoshop was a bit janky on SGI back then, IIRC, but still the better of the two platforms overall. [1] http://lensgarden.com/uncategorized/live-picture-software-that-was-way-ahead-of-its-time/ http://lensgarden.com/uncategorized/live-picture-software-th...
  - ompogUe 2y ago
    Yes, I remember Live Picture! It was slick. I actually spent more time in that and Fractal Design Painter, than Photoshop back then.
  - huxley 2y ago
    Hahaha that’s Old School. Live Picture was one of several photo compositor tools that focused on Photoshop’s pain points. Fauve Matisse was a little earlier than Live Picture and I believe it introduced layers to Mac photo editing. They ended up getting acquired by Macromedia (or perhaps even Macromind) after a rewrite to compete with Live Picture it was renamed Xres and then abandoned.
  - Daub 2y ago
    I believe that Livepicture was fast because they loaded the full image as a set of tiles. I also believe that Photoshop was 'inspired' to introduce layers in version 3 in response to Livepicture's layers. It was layers which caused Photoshop to explode in popularity. Adobe then went on to sue Macromedia for using tabs in their interface. Bummer.
  - sillywalk 2y ago
ljm 2y ago
The Messy Middle is an incredible book that essentially details how the CEO of BeHance, back in the day, rewrote Adobe's offering for the cloud, and detailed how he'd do it. Scott Belsky - now investor himself - writing how he sold both BeHance and Adobe down the road for the rent economy. I say The Messy Middle is an incredible book, but it is shelf help for dwindling execs. To their generic credit, the open source scene for artistry and imagery is better than it ever was, because everybody has been priced out of the pro tools that actually can't keep up without community support.
vondur 2y ago
Back in 1997-98 we had Pentium II machines (450mhz) with fast SCSI drives and 128 MB of ram that were fast Photoshop machines. I also remember it being pretty fast on the G3 Mac's when they first came out.
- MenhirMike 2y ago
  > I also remember it being pretty fast on the G3 Mac's when they first came out. One of the comments that Steve Jobs made in the Boston 1997 speech was "No one at Apple has reached out to Adobe to ask how to build the ultimate Photoshop machine" - and in the next few years, Photoshop benchmarks were a key Mac vs Intel comparison during his keynotes. I don't know if Jobs already had influence on the original beige Power Macintosh G3, but he really seemed to care about Photoshop performance when he arrived.
ChiperSoft 2y ago
Back when PS6 was the current release I deliberately downgraded to copies of 2 and 3.5 that I found on a Hotline server, because they were extremely fast and did 90% of what I used photoshop for.

by TIPSIO 2y ago

darknavi 2y ago

I still use an old CS6 license and while it's snappy in the app, it still takes its time to boot.

aredox 2y ago

Is it because the UX is good or because changing it is impossible without the users rebelling en masse?

biofox 2y ago
No point fixing something that isn't broken (someone please tell Microsoft)
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >No point fixing something that isn't broken But how do you know a UX isn't broken, when you've only seen one iteration of it you're whole life and have nothing else to compare it to? Kind of like Plato's Cave Allegory. You have to try new things, and if you see them fail, then you know which one was the best.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    "try" doesn't imply "ship to millions of customers" And sometimes there's good enough and you should leave it alone. QWERTY isn't optimal but it's not very far from it.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      But if you're not gonna ship it to all your millions of users and receive the outrage as feedback, how will you ever know if it works or not? A/B testing to a few users only works in web-app front-ends, not in professional tools where all single end-user releases need to look and act exactly the same. Shipping to only a handful of users wasn't a thing in the era of "Gold CD" releases, and even in the era of the internet updates, nobody will want to take part in A/B testing and end up with a different Photoshop UX than what his colleague is using, so you either ship to all or none. So it seems Photoshop's UI is more of a cause of inertia and resistance to change, rather than nailing right the first time.
      - marginalia_nu 2y ago
        A/B testing does very little to improve any UX. It's got merits in performance optimization, where the implementation differs but the contract is static between A and B, but with user interfaces, it generally leads to pessimizations as usage is not proportional to usefulness. The rare exception is single-purpose interfaces where increasing one singular interaction is an end in itself, e.g. a marketing page, but that's a pretty unique case that is very far removed from a productivity tool.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        You bring in testers and UI experts, and you have the experts watch the testers. Shipping to mass market is a bad way to get feedback.
        Karunamon 2y ago
        Are there such a thing as UI experts anymore? It seems like we only have designers left, and I am none too thrilled about their influence.
    - eimrine 2y ago
      Qwerty is a significant brake in learning English from scratch.
  - beau_g 2y ago
    Use gimp, add a new layer, paste something into it, and resize it, then you will know
    - frankharv 2y ago
      How about PhotoShop's Magic Lasso? I have not found many tools that work as well and make productivity great.
- navjack27 2y ago
  Hard to do when the power users for the most part try to block analytics and the insider testers have very fluid workflows and there is no such thing as death by a thousand papercuts to them. They aren't getting the signal because the people that should be telling them the signal are actively denying sending the signal.
  - eimrine 2y ago
    Аre you saying this about OS which shows ads in Start menu?
- turnsout 2y ago
  In Photoshop there are at least three completely different dialog boxes [0] for saving an image as a JPEG, each with totally different UI widgets and functionality. They simply refuse to revise anything in the interface—they just keep adding. It's the software equivalent of hoarding. [0] Save/Save as, Export As, Save for Web (Legacy)
  - bombcar 2y ago
    I'm ride-or-die on Save for Web (Legacy), it's the way to go by far. Now if they'd just integrate the tinypng plugin that was deprecated in 2023 - https://help.tinify.com/help/deprecation-of-the-photoshop-plugin https://help.tinify.com/help/deprecation-of-the-photoshop-pl...
    - turnsout 2y ago
      Same—I just wish they'd either drop the "(Legacy)" and admit that they can never remove it, or add those same features to the Export dialog!
  - reddalo 2y ago
    How long has the Save for Web been "Legacy"? I feel like it's been there for a long time.
    - jaredwy 2y ago
      I was the engineer that added that string. Since adding that string... I joined the photoshop team officially. Spent maybe 5 years there. I have left adobe. I Had a year and a half sabbatical. Now writing this comment. It's been a while.
      - turnsout 2y ago
        Ha, comments like this are why I love hn!
    - MontagFTB 2y ago
      The intent was to direct customers to the new “Export As” experience, which was a newer code base and handled some things SFW did not. Enough people couldn’t leave SFW behind though, and it’s been Legacy ever since. Anecdotally, SFW is the result of converting Adobe ImageReady into a plugin. When IR was originally created, many of its sources were split off from Photoshop to get it off the ground. So now we have two variants of “the same” sources for many files- one evolving in Photoshop, and the other frozen in time in Save for Web.
kjellsbells 2y ago
I cant speak for all PS users, but it's not that it is a special UX so much that it is embedded in the muscle memory of the user community, and that degree of familiarity contributes mightily to people being able to get work done quickly. The closest example I cam think of, which people inside Adobe most certainly know about, is the failed attempts by Quark Xpress to update their product in the late 90s/early 00s, which led to them losing a 95% market share position to Adobe InDesign. You do not mess with the tools that a loud and creative community rely upon to get their jobs done.
- philistine 2y ago
  The only way Adobe can get out of this conundrum is by announcing a transition to a new interface, finding ways to incentivize schools to teach the new interface, while keeping the old one around for as long as possible to give time for the oldies to slowly retire. We're talking decades.
  - basch 2y ago
    The user interface is extremely customizable. You can have a default layout and still keep legacy ones around. You wouldn’t need to kill the legacy layout unless you are removing the cuetomizability.
- brazzledazzle 2y ago
  Adobe actually changed a bunch of shortcuts at least a couple of points between photoshop 7 and creative cloud. I remember how I'd developed muscle memory that took a bit to fully overwrite.
  - tambourine_man 2y ago
    There are settings to revert them all
    - brazzledazzle 2y ago
      Yeah but I wanted to maintain "compatibility" with others using the software whether for discussion's sake or so I can hop on their workstation and not have to think about changing anything. Turning those legacy settings on and having that survive restarts could be flaky/buggy. I got the impression keeping that functionality well tested wasn't the highest thing on their development priorities.
BeFlatXIII 2y ago
Considering how many complaints about GIMP UI being bad with no more substance than "Just compare it to Photoshop!", I'd bet 65% on option B.
bufferoverflow 2y ago
As someone, who used Photoshop a lot, the UI/UX is good. It would be pretty hard to make it significantly better. And yes, even if you somehow made it better, many users would complain, because they have muscle memory of the UX, and are extremely efficient with it.
maxglute 2y ago
It would be curious to see UX timeline of what PS influenced, and what influenced it, in mouse age. A lot of desktop derivative products seem to hold on PS-like UI, it's all very mutually reinforcing. I'm not sure what iPad UX is like. I remember autocad products also adding ribbon system and it wasn't end of the world, but also very few ppl that I know end up migrating. Part of me feels like it's... either very optimal for masses to learn because very few PSers (outside of photography) I know have professional peripherals (some have hotkey stickers on keycaps), vs lots of other creative fields have specialized decks/hardware to make streamline workflow. Like part of me feels like there is a better physical hardware implmentation to manipulate all the curves/histograms other than moving around with mouse, but mouse+keyboard is... good enough.
- marbletiles 2y ago
  A lot of PS 1.0's UI (2-col toolbox on the left etc) owes its heritage to MacPaint, which was a launch app for the Mac. Even the iPad shares keyboard shortcuts set by the original Mac, though has considerably broken away in other aspects.
bonestamp2 2y ago
When Photoshop went subscription I bought the full version of CS6 (or whatever the last non-subscription version was). It was very expensive. Then when that stopped working on Mac, I tried using every reasonable competitor, paid for several. I'm sure some of them are very competent tools, but it was a nightmare trying to learn a new UI. I bit the bullet and started paying the subscription.

grishka 2y ago

Just downgrade? I still use some version from 2022, the first M1-compatible one that was cracked. Still as snappy as it was 2 years ago.

ompogUe 2y ago

Not sure if you worked with it in the early '90's, but on a Mac w/4MB of RAM, it took ~5-10 minutes to undo a Guassian Blur. The pain was real. The way to go back then was the SGI Indigo w/96MB. It worked best for me in the late '90's on a 9500, and even then needed an entire GB of RAM.

alamortsubite 2y ago
Ha! In the early '90's the way to go was Live Picture [1]! Your undo would have been instantaneous! Unfortunately, Live Picture only ran on Mac. Photoshop was a bit janky on SGI back then, IIRC, but still the better of the two platforms overall. [1] http://lensgarden.com/uncategorized/live-picture-software-that-was-way-ahead-of-its-time/ http://lensgarden.com/uncategorized/live-picture-software-th...
- ompogUe 2y ago
  Yes, I remember Live Picture! It was slick. I actually spent more time in that and Fractal Design Painter, than Photoshop back then.
- huxley 2y ago
  Hahaha that’s Old School. Live Picture was one of several photo compositor tools that focused on Photoshop’s pain points. Fauve Matisse was a little earlier than Live Picture and I believe it introduced layers to Mac photo editing. They ended up getting acquired by Macromedia (or perhaps even Macromind) after a rewrite to compete with Live Picture it was renamed Xres and then abandoned.
- Daub 2y ago
  I believe that Livepicture was fast because they loaded the full image as a set of tiles. I also believe that Photoshop was 'inspired' to introduce layers in version 3 in response to Livepicture's layers. It was layers which caused Photoshop to explode in popularity. Adobe then went on to sue Macromedia for using tabs in their interface. Bummer.
- sillywalk 2y ago

ljm 2y ago

The Messy Middle is an incredible book that essentially details how the CEO of BeHance, back in the day, rewrote Adobe's offering for the cloud, and detailed how he'd do it. Scott Belsky - now investor himself - writing how he sold both BeHance and Adobe down the road for the rent economy. I say The Messy Middle is an incredible book, but it is shelf help for dwindling execs. To their generic credit, the open source scene for artistry and imagery is better than it ever was, because everybody has been priced out of the pro tools that actually can't keep up without community support.

vondur 2y ago

Back in 1997-98 we had Pentium II machines (450mhz) with fast SCSI drives and 128 MB of ram that were fast Photoshop machines. I also remember it being pretty fast on the G3 Mac's when they first came out.

MenhirMike 2y ago
> I also remember it being pretty fast on the G3 Mac's when they first came out. One of the comments that Steve Jobs made in the Boston 1997 speech was "No one at Apple has reached out to Adobe to ask how to build the ultimate Photoshop machine" - and in the next few years, Photoshop benchmarks were a key Mac vs Intel comparison during his keynotes. I don't know if Jobs already had influence on the original beige Power Macintosh G3, but he really seemed to care about Photoshop performance when he arrived.

ChiperSoft 2y ago

Back when PS6 was the current release I deliberately downgraded to copies of 2 and 3.5 that I found on a Hotline server, because they were extremely fast and did 90% of what I used photoshop for.