

Photoshop CS6 beta now available to download - mrsebastian
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/123179-photoshop-cs6-plenty-of-goodies-for-everyone

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natesm
The layer stack system is getting really tired. Here's what I'd like to see:

\- Node-based layer system, like Quartz Composer and Max/MSP. Right now, any
complex nesting of layer styles has to be done via Smart Objects, which is a
terrible hack that has you saving, seeing what the effect on the final image
is, then going back and making more changes, repeat.

\- It's 2012. There should not be destructive filters anymore. All filters
should just be another node in this layout. If you'd like to apply them, you
should be able to right click a node and merge everything that feeds into it.
Brushes should also be usable as layers. Composite everything.

\- Where's this layer system going to go? Obviously, it will go on screen, but
how about an iPad app that pairs with Photoshop for displaying and altering
it? They already have something sort of like this for tools.

\- Photoshop badly needs usable variables of some sort. I'm tired of jumping
around 5 different places because I decided I want to change a color.

\- Going with the last one, documents should be able to contain multiple
images, like Illustrator does. This would be a great addition for icon design,
since you could (easily, without ugly hacks) have all of your sizes in the
same document. Combine that with variables, and...

\- Finally, stop the sucky non-native UI already. Stop replacing perfectly
good Cocoa widgets with terrible Air ones.

Adding fancy new features is nice and stuff, but the fundamental UI of this
application is getting really dated.

~~~
gramsey
Definitely agree with the non-native UI point. I've been using Photoshop for
years on my Macbooks, and the interface has always had a clunky, slow,
unnatural, and Flash-era feel to it. I wonder what the reasoning behind using
this terrible UI vs Cocoa is?

~~~
illicium
Portability. It would be very inconvenient to maintain two completely separate
UI codebases.

~~~
gramsey
Yes, but shouldn't some portability be sacrificed? Google Chrome, for example,
has the same interface on OS X and Windows, but is fast and has a native feel
on both platforms.

~~~
fredley
There's a vast, vast gap in the complexity of Chrome's ui and Photoshop's. I
maintain an app with a cross-platform ui (Mac/Windows/*nix), and it adds an
enormous amount of time re-doing everything on different platforms,
particularly Mac.

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sgdesign
Nice list of new features here: <http://bjango.com/articles/photoshopcs6/>

Seems they addressed a lot of criticism, and improved the UI for web designers
in particular.

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tomkin
I think this is going to be the Photoshop where people _seriously_ start
considering a web-based alternative. Not because CS6 will be poor software,
but because I think the division among users who use Photoshop for photo
editing/professional photography/restoration/stationary/brochure design and
those who use it for designing web sites and applications is getting greater.
The latter needing less of the options available in Photoshop today, let alone
CS6. I say this with over 10 years of experience as a designer/developer –
Photoshop needs a Basecamp simplicity-inspired derivative. I think as we move
to more institutional, common & predictable UI (if we do), we'll find that
we're doing very simple tasks and that those tasks can be taken from Photoshop
and automated for the purpose of web/app design and execution. I know there
are a few alternatives to Photoshop already, but of all the ones I've seen
(yes, even Pixelmator) none of them really go for _just the web industry_. I
think the market for such a tool (hopefully web-based) would be pretty great
at this point – and given the audience – using state-of-the-art browser API
wouldn't be much of an issue.

Long ago, Adobe had this product called "Photoshop Server" or something
similar. I believe it was based off of Macromedia's Generator (which generated
server-side Flash content). The concept was neat - place variables within a
PSD, upload it and allow the server to render out based on what you wanted to
show. The problem with this, of course, was that it was proprietary, heavy,
expensive and overall pretty crappy. It would be really interesting to see
someone create a web-based web design/development application that interacted
with some OSS library that most hosting companies would allow (like gd, ning,
etc), read .json and interpret data within the image.

Probably a bad idea, but how big would a .json-based image be compared to the
average jpg? Pretty big, I'll bet. But I wonder with gzip compression how
manageable could it be? Would be really cool to define information (text
inside of the image, accessibility, SEO capabilities) within a .json-based
image. No license required and it would be readable by any human or software.

    
    
      {
        "dimensions": { "width": 3, "height": 3 },
        "data": [
             ["rgba(255,255,255,1)","rgba(255,255,255,1)","rgba(255,255,255,1)"],
             ["rgba(255,255,255,1)","rgba(255,255,255,1)","rgba(255,255,255,1)"],
             ["rgba(255,255,255,1)","rgba(255,255,255,1)","rgba(255,255,255,1)"]
         ]
      }
    

Yep. That would be huge. I suppose that is a massive digression of the topic
but this would be my ideal image format, outside of svg/canvas of course.

~~~
batista
_I think this is going to be the Photoshop where people seriously start
considering a web-based alternative. Not because CS6 will be poor software,
but because I think the division among users who use Photoshop for photo
editing/professional photography/restoration/stationary/brochure design and
those who use it for designing web sites and applications is getting greater.
The latter needing less of the options available in Photoshop today, let alone
CS6._

Photoshop is used by creative professionals first and foremost. It's a $600+
software package.

(The people using Photoshop that don't need much of it's power are mostly
those that use a pirated copy for some basic home use).

That said, there is Photoshop Elements already, a cut down version.

And there is a web version made by Adobe too.

That said, web editors: sucked, and still suck. For some very basic stuff ok.
But try even uploading your last 100 12mo pictures you took with your compact
camera. Even uploading and editing one by one, it will take ages, usually
taking down the browser at some point.

~~~
harlanlewis
_(The people using Photoshop that don't need much of it's power are mostly
those that use a pirated copy for some basic home use)._

I disagree.

I did pirate a copy for home use - I was a youngling, the version was v5.0
(not CS5), and that early curiosity turned into a career full of purchased
Adobe products.

Along the way I've learned a lot of new tricks, but my core practices are
largely similar to what they've always been. I struggle to think of any other
tool or skill that's changed less over that length of time - for me, the new
useful bits are largely codifying and refining old manual processes.

It's precisely because the core has remained so untouched by age that the
simplified version can be translated to iPads and web apps - Photoshop is a
classic case of 20% of the features are used by everyone, and the rest is
deemed absolutely essential by specific groups. This happens to most
successful programs over time.

Building Photoshop again for other mediums can't help but discard a lot of
cruft while discovering a bunch of significantly new things to do - it's
actually a pretty exciting time for image editors as they rediscover purpose
and set new charters.

~~~
batista
_Along the way I've learned a lot of new tricks, but my core practices are
largely similar to what they've always been. I struggle to think of any other
tool or skill that's changed less over that length of time - for me, the new
useful bits are largely codifying and refining old manual processes._

Well, the "codifying and refining old manual processes" is what software like
Photoshop is all about. Where do you draw the line?

A lot of stuff introduced AFTER version 5 is used everyday by almost anyone.
In fact, Layer Styles (version 6) is the number one requested feature for
Pixelmator.

Other stuff:

fully vector text, camera RAW (7),

Shadow/Highlight, Match Color, Lens Blur, Hierarchical layer groups, 16 bit
per channel, support for files over 2 Gigabytes, type on a path (8),

Smart Objects, Smart Sharpen (9),

Smart (non-destructive) Filters (10)

And other stuff, maybe not visible, but that we couldn't live without AT ALL,
like Intel Mac support, and 64-bit support, plus the "how did we work before"
GPU support, all introduced in later versions than 10.

~~~
harlanlewis
Good points! I actually don't have much of an argument to make, just the
evolution of old+successful software is an interesting topic. It is definitely
a fuzzy line between "new thing" and "old but better", and your list has a
bunch of must-have-every-single-day features that haven't always existed. I
admit I'm glossing over the "invisible" work like Intel Mac support. I'm
mostly interested in the interaction.

But - that list is fairly short, and things like nondestructive filters,
hierarchical layer groups, type on a path, etc are exactly the codifying of
manual processes I was talking about. They've certainly replaced duplicating
layers and using complicated naming conventions to manage all the bloat.

So they're technically "new features", but they're not reinventing what folks
can accomplish, or even altering the fundamentals of how one thinks about a
task. That's a big accomplishment for software that has to please so many
existing+trained users, and I'm looking forward to CS6 precisely because it
seems focused on improvements to what people already do every day, rather than
cool but rarely appropriate features like magic background fills and bending
spoons.

We've been given a huge toolbelt to work with - the move from desktop software
to web and tablets is going to be pretty awesome as we look at the whole belt
through a new lens, and (potentially) significantly improve on everything from
palette-oriented UI to how we manage discreet and grouped elements in a
complex composition. Even more opportunity as Photoshop begins to acknowledge
its expansion of purpose from photos and graphics to quickly comping high-
fidelity interactive UIs.

Relative to all that's coming, Photoshop hasn't changed much. Exciting times
ahead.

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cageface
I hope they're devoting some resources to Fireworks. For web & mobile app
graphics I find it far more effective than Photoshop but there are still a lot
of rough edges to smooth out.

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lbotos
I'm downloading the beta now but a question for any Creative Suite users, have
you had any luck getting CS apps to work when installed anywhere else but
/applications on Mac? I have multiple users on this mac and only want CS to be
usable for one user. I've moved the apps into ~/applications but updates
break. :/ Also, Is it just me or do any other Mac users get infuriated with
their folder/app structure?

~~~
axbx
> Also, Is it just me or do any other Mac users get infuriated with their
> folder/app structure?

Adobe's complete disrespect for your file system is legendary.

And to make the experience even worse, if you move the 7 useless folders in
say /Applications into something like /Applications/Adobe (that you never use
anyway), their software updater breaks all over the place.

~~~
uxp
It's a hack, but if you have XCode installed, you can outright hide the
directories.

    
    
        /usr/bin/SetFile -a V /Applications/Adobe\ Foo

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XLcommerce
Photoshop is a classic example of bloatware taken to the extreme. I'm running
CS5 and routinely run out of RAM with just a few modest files open. It's
ridiculous. I'm going back to CS3 as soon as I find some time to _upgrade_

~~~
jjcm
Disagree. Photoshop is a professional level tool. When they're building new
features, they aren't listening to the common guy who uses 10-20% of the
features every once in a while. They're listening to the design professional
who has photoshop open 24/7. They guy who lives in photoshop is their
customer. That's the person who's willing to drop $1k on a piece of software -
the other common guy is just going to download the trial and block
activate.adobe.com. If you think photoshop is bloatware, it's because you
aren't using all of its features. Photoshop is vast in its depth. Keeping a
thousand states of a high res picture in ram takes a lot of memory. Keeping
hundreds of composited layers and transforms in ram is equally hungry.

You can curtail your ram usage if you want it to use less - the default is set
to be fairly greedy. For myself though, I have photoshop set to use up to 20GB
of RAM (and I routinely hit that mark) with a dedicated SSD for caching, but
that's because I use 80-90% of the features in photoshop. If you're only using
10% of the program, consider switching programs.

~~~
XLcommerce
Yeah that's a fair enough comment. The truth is that I'm probably using more
like 2% of the program. I think for someone like me the perfect balance of
features/performance was at about cs2/cs3 maybe even cs1, I cant remember. So
I most likely will be downgrading.

~~~
Terretta
Check out Pixelmator or Acorn?

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duck
Not related to CS6... but has anyone been successful using Photoshop with
Linux? I've tried getting it to run through wine before, but never with any
luck.

~~~
adrahon
I've found CS2 to work with Wine. Wasn't there a story of Google contributing
code to Wine to make Photoshop work? CS5 is listed as Gold on
[http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application...](http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=17)

I use The Gimp anyway (I know, I know).

~~~
danieldk
Actually, browsing that entry paints a bleaker picture. Of the five most
recent testing reports, two are gold, one silver, one bronze, one garbage.

According to the bronze report:

 _The text tool causes the entire application to freeze (even with atmlib
installed). The paintbrush works only very intermittently. Moving and docking
panels was buggy, and the bluish docking indicators instead rendered as black
rectangles making it impossible to see._

and:

 _What was not tested: Vector manipulations, filters, adjustment layers._

It's fine for playing with Photoshop on Linux a bit, but not something you'd
want to rely on for your business. I guess a virtual machine with Windows is
still the most viable solution.

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speednoise
Great overview of what's new from Marc Edwards
<http://bjango.com/articles/photoshopcs6/>

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cynix
_Still_ can't install on a case-sensitive file system. Seriously Adobe, how
hard is it to fix your Makefiles?

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mvkel
I'm going to try Pixelmator again. There's absolutely no reason why this app
should need an installer.

~~~
jjcm
The built in GPU acceleration depends on quite a few libraries. Not only that,
but the interface is entirely custom (based on air). Photoshop isn't some
little stand alone app. It's a 2GB behemoth. Why wouldn't it have an
installer?

~~~
mvkel
My point was more big-picture. The app shouldn't have an entirely custom Air-
based UI when there are great Cocoa libraries available. Hell, even a hybrid
with some Cocoa would be better (ala Aperture). It _should_ be a stand alone
app at this point.

The argument about "people wouldn't want to transfer to the new UI" is
conjecture. Film pros have been switching to new versions of Final Cut Pro
without complaint.

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snorkel
Download for free or the usual first-born list price?

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dutchbrit
I get an Access Denied when trying to download the beta..

