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> At the core of Photoshop is a consistent, powerful, tightly-coded, thoughtfully-designed set of tools for creating and manipulating images. Once you learn the

> At the core of Photoshop is a consistent, powerful, tightly-coded, thoughtfully-designed set of tools for creating and manipulating images. Once you learn the conventions, it feels like the computer is on your side, you're free, you're force-multiplied, your thoughts are manifest. It's funny that today there still isn't a free image editing software comparable with the Photoshop from 2000. Krita is close, but still cumbersome to use.

misnome 2y ago
I’m sure that it is a complete coincidence that CS6, the last before they moved to a subscription model, is the last time it was mostly nonsense-free
- marsovo 2y ago
  Indeed. The trouble with subscriptions is that you don't need to make the new version actually good enough to convince people to upgrade, you just need to make it not bad enough for people to abandon the subscription entirely. I think the same thing happened to Windows and Office. Having said that, there's probably another elephant in the room, namely the current generation that grew up with phones and tablets and didn't really learn to use traditional computers fluently
noduerme 2y ago
I would love to jettison Photoshop/Illustrator and just use Affinity. Illustrator has recently gone from taking 30 seconds to over 2 minutes to launch on my M1. It's an atrocity. But Adobe software is so entrenched in printing that, even though print media is only 10% or less of what I do these days, it would just be an endless headache to deal with file conversions to and from other designers, print shops and publishers. And anyway I expect Affinity will go the same way soon, now that they're owned by Canva.
rcarmo 2y ago
I'm surprised nobody mentioned GIMP in the 2 hours since you wrote this (I still use Fireworks inside WINE).
- card_zero 2y ago
  I'm not particularly surprised: who wants to try to hold up GIMP as an exemplar of a good interface? Maybe by arguing "it's not as bad as it was, and now it hardly sucks at all". I'm an old Photoshop user who has GIMP now. I'd like to do a breakdown of everything that's wrong with its interface behavior, but analysing exactly how it does behave would be a major mission. There's something - several things - wrong with how it selects, moves, deselects, selects layers, and zooms, compared to what I expect for the workflow I try to have. Possibly this is just a matter of needing to learn new conventions, but possibly I have learned the GIMP conventions and they're just clunky. Interesting, though, since this is organic, grass roots, free software interface crappiness, not the coercive corporate kind.
  - cladopa 2y ago
    I have used Photoshop and GIMP a lot. I do not see how GIMP interface is that clunky. It seems clear to me that most people get used to some interface and anything different is wrong. I saw that a lot with Windows users changing to Mac or linux interfaces. Anything 100% identical is "interface crappiness". Apple interfaces have always run circles around Microsoft's, that copied things from Apple without understanding the fundamentals or hiring proper designers. My problem with GIMP was always that it was not as powerful for the professional, like the support for color spaces with lots of bits per channel. That looks solved now, although I had not time to test is personally. On the other hand, you could program GIMP much easier with Script Fu (a Lisp dialect) with less restrictions, like with most open source software.
    - card_zero 2y ago
      I did change from Mac to Windows shortly after the millennium, and it was fine. Window buttons were in different places, but that was trivial. Windows would minimize properly instead of the "windowshade" thing Mac had at the time (folding up into the titlebar), because Windows had a taskbar to minimize to, and that was better. I disliked the prevalence of installers (generally you could just drag an executable to another Mac and it would work) and I disliked the creepy labyrinth of user-hostile system files and system folders, which has only gotten worse. But that isn't really interface. I thought the start menu was stupid, but I could just ignore it, and I still ignore it today (Explorer all the way). On the whole I didn't think there was much difference, apart from a general vibe of crassness on Windows, which had no clear cause. But that's switching from Classic Mac OS: you're probably talking about the new OSX BSD linuxy one. Besides, it would have been Win2K I switched to, which was one of the best iterations. I used Linux for a while too, but that was XFCE, so again kind of samey. Mainly I remember constantly having to go through Sudo whenever I wanted it to do anything, that was the distinctive interface difference. Color spaces, a closed book to me. I can't stand color spaces, they were always some sort of unwieldy mess of interest to other people. People who print things, maybe, I don't know. From my perspective, they caused a lot of pretentious confusion when people were trying to make images on computers for viewing on computers and for some reason didn't do the natural thing and think in three bytes of RGB. Scripting, I hadn't even thought about, and I'll give you that one. Photoshop had a mechanism for recording actions and playing them back, and it produced a linear list of actions, with no control flow. I definitely wanted a better scripting mechanism.
zoomerknowledge 2y ago
Photopea

misnome 2y ago

I’m sure that it is a complete coincidence that CS6, the last before they moved to a subscription model, is the last time it was mostly nonsense-free

marsovo 2y ago
Indeed. The trouble with subscriptions is that you don't need to make the new version actually good enough to convince people to upgrade, you just need to make it not bad enough for people to abandon the subscription entirely. I think the same thing happened to Windows and Office. Having said that, there's probably another elephant in the room, namely the current generation that grew up with phones and tablets and didn't really learn to use traditional computers fluently

noduerme 2y ago

I would love to jettison Photoshop/Illustrator and just use Affinity. Illustrator has recently gone from taking 30 seconds to over 2 minutes to launch on my M1. It's an atrocity. But Adobe software is so entrenched in printing that, even though print media is only 10% or less of what I do these days, it would just be an endless headache to deal with file conversions to and from other designers, print shops and publishers. And anyway I expect Affinity will go the same way soon, now that they're owned by Canva.

rcarmo 2y ago

I'm surprised nobody mentioned GIMP in the 2 hours since you wrote this (I still use Fireworks inside WINE).

card_zero 2y ago
I'm not particularly surprised: who wants to try to hold up GIMP as an exemplar of a good interface? Maybe by arguing "it's not as bad as it was, and now it hardly sucks at all". I'm an old Photoshop user who has GIMP now. I'd like to do a breakdown of everything that's wrong with its interface behavior, but analysing exactly how it does behave would be a major mission. There's something - several things - wrong with how it selects, moves, deselects, selects layers, and zooms, compared to what I expect for the workflow I try to have. Possibly this is just a matter of needing to learn new conventions, but possibly I have learned the GIMP conventions and they're just clunky. Interesting, though, since this is organic, grass roots, free software interface crappiness, not the coercive corporate kind.
- cladopa 2y ago
  I have used Photoshop and GIMP a lot. I do not see how GIMP interface is that clunky. It seems clear to me that most people get used to some interface and anything different is wrong. I saw that a lot with Windows users changing to Mac or linux interfaces. Anything 100% identical is "interface crappiness". Apple interfaces have always run circles around Microsoft's, that copied things from Apple without understanding the fundamentals or hiring proper designers. My problem with GIMP was always that it was not as powerful for the professional, like the support for color spaces with lots of bits per channel. That looks solved now, although I had not time to test is personally. On the other hand, you could program GIMP much easier with Script Fu (a Lisp dialect) with less restrictions, like with most open source software.
  - card_zero 2y ago
    I did change from Mac to Windows shortly after the millennium, and it was fine. Window buttons were in different places, but that was trivial. Windows would minimize properly instead of the "windowshade" thing Mac had at the time (folding up into the titlebar), because Windows had a taskbar to minimize to, and that was better. I disliked the prevalence of installers (generally you could just drag an executable to another Mac and it would work) and I disliked the creepy labyrinth of user-hostile system files and system folders, which has only gotten worse. But that isn't really interface. I thought the start menu was stupid, but I could just ignore it, and I still ignore it today (Explorer all the way). On the whole I didn't think there was much difference, apart from a general vibe of crassness on Windows, which had no clear cause. But that's switching from Classic Mac OS: you're probably talking about the new OSX BSD linuxy one. Besides, it would have been Win2K I switched to, which was one of the best iterations. I used Linux for a while too, but that was XFCE, so again kind of samey. Mainly I remember constantly having to go through Sudo whenever I wanted it to do anything, that was the distinctive interface difference. Color spaces, a closed book to me. I can't stand color spaces, they were always some sort of unwieldy mess of interest to other people. People who print things, maybe, I don't know. From my perspective, they caused a lot of pretentious confusion when people were trying to make images on computers for viewing on computers and for some reason didn't do the natural thing and think in three bytes of RGB. Scripting, I hadn't even thought about, and I'll give you that one. Photoshop had a mechanism for recording actions and playing them back, and it produced a linear list of actions, with no control flow. I definitely wanted a better scripting mechanism.

zoomerknowledge 2y ago

Photopea