
The many sliders of Photoshop CS4 - DavidSJ
http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/235455865/the-many-sliders-of-photoshop-cs4
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bbb
What kind of development process leads to such variety of sliders? Don't they
have one GUI library team? Did they buy all the components from other
companies that happened to have their own slider implementation?

I mean, sure, some specialized implementations are useful (e.g., picking a
color/hue), but this is a bit excessive. Somebody must have written all these
implementations. Somebody needs to maintain them. This costs real money... why
would you want to do that?

~~~
blasdel
_Don't they have one GUI library team?_

Nope. They don't even have one string object or math library.

When I talked to a guy who worked on Mac stuff for Adobe, he said that pretty
much anything that could be shared, _isn't_. Every flagship product is
independent, and most were the result of at least one acquisition (some
circular!). Pretty much every effort they've made to rationalize things into a
coherent suite has just resulted in regressions, as none of the object models
line up.

The engineers at Adobe know full well how shitty their flagship products are.
Lightroom is what they can produce in green-field development, and it is
awesome both in implementation (mostly Lua) and usability (no bloat). Apple's
Aperture had a significant public first start, and was still quickly beaten
with a superior product. Quite unexpected.

~~~
callmeed
FWIW I still prefer Aperture over LR. LR's UI wastes a lot of screen real
estate IMO.

But your main point is spot on.

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amadiver
PhotoShop may be the oldest program running on your computer now. The fact
that there's even a modicum of commonality in the UI is amazing. While I agree
that there's a lot of room for improvement, anyone working who's ever touched
legacy code can see that there's more to this issue.

[http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/05/some_thoughts_about_psd...](http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/05/some_thoughts_about_psd.html)

~~~
windsurfer
He's defending PSD by saying "It works great the way it is. And people
shouldn't be wanting interoperability with Photoshop.

A key phrase is " _And it's not at all clear that the benefits here would
outweigh the costs._ ". Whose costs, and whose benefits? Obviously it wouldn't
be great for Adobe to have to re-write their file format, and they wouldn't
get that many happy customers initially.

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kalendae
Sliders? There are features in Photoshop that only make sense if you have done
darkroom development. They are already so heavily invested into being complex
and it has been OK so far. For more reasonable UI, you can use Adobe
Lightroom.

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memetichazard
I don't get it. It seems like for the author, ugly means 'not like OSX', since
the only one found likeable was the one most like the default OSX slider.

In particular, layer blender, threshold, and color balance would suffer if it
was more like the default.

~~~
ori_b
Well, ugly could also mean "doesn't fit in with the rest of the desktop".

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joe_the_user
Sliders are truly annoying in computers which lack them as a physical input
device.

Now, if you could a laptop with ten knobs on the side of it AND an API to use
them, then sliders in an app would be cool.

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andrewljohnson
Is Photoshop vulnerable now? I wonder what a scrappy start-up could do in this
space. What are the major technical challenges? Marketing challenges?

~~~
eric_t
The problem is that there is a whole industry created around Photoshop, all
artists use it, it's taught in every college/course, and there are a million
books written about it. For a startup to compete against that momentum would
be extremely difficult. There is also considerable competition from open
source/free programs like GIMP and Paint.Net. Pixelmator seems like it's doing
well, though.

I think the opportunities lie more in creating niche tools. Just look at all
the tools created the last few years for photographers, the top one perhaps
being Adobe Lightroom. It contains most of the image editing tools from PS
that a photographer needs, but is built more around the photographer's
workflow.

~~~
jacobolus
> _For a startup to compete against that momentum would be extremely
> difficult._

I think it would be very difficult for a startup to make a replacement
photoshop, but that shouldn't really be anyone's goal (photoshop already
exists), and with actual novel ideas about how editing should be done, I think
there are quite reasonable opportunities: it's always difficult to make
quality software, but image editors and their market aren't inherently worse
in this respect than email clients, say, or word processors, or many types of
games, etc.

> _considerable competition from open source/free programs like GIMP and
> Paint.Net_

Really? I don't know anyone who uses these for serious work. I understand the
GIMP gets used in particular niches, such as among free software ideologues,
but I don't think competition from these would be a real problem for anyone
trying to make a serious image editor.

> _It contains most of the image editing tools from PS that a photographer
> needs_

Not really. Most Lightroom users also use Photoshop, and Lightroom's goals as
a product are completely different from Photoshop's (image organization,
selection, comparison, rather than careful editing): they're complementary,
not competitors.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I use The GIMP for serious work - production of advertising materials for
print and for any non-vector elements of website designs. The quality demands
(see eg <http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/> ) seem so low in the print
media industry that most graphic designers probably aren't using CS4 to any
great advantage.

The only times I've needed anything else have been because the printers say
"we only accept a PSD" or "files must be from Corel 9" or whatever. They
always take something else in the end. Actually it's more often I need to use
AI files and Inkscape's not doing to bad on that.

Exact colour match (pantones, etc.) doesn't matter for me; my target market
couldn't generally care less that the shade is ever so slightly out and in
most print situations the colour is either off at print (newspapers) or off by
the point of viewing (eg magazine in a rack that's faded for a month).

~~~
jacobolus
> _I use The GIMP for serious work_

When you say “production of advertising materials” what do you mean? You work
for an ad agency? Or you sometimes wear a “design hat” in addition to your
other roles at your company? Because if you were spending 40 hours a week on
design work, buying and learning and using Photoshop instead of the GIMP would
pay for itself quite quickly.

I should have been clearer. I'm sure _there exist_ people who use the GIMP,
even though I don’t know them. I do not, however, think the GIMP provides
“considerable competition” in the image editing space by any reasonable
definition of “considerable”. I don’t have any solid numbers of my own, and
really have no idea how I’d look for any, but if we just judge by, for
instance, relative numbers of books offered for sale about each product,
Photoshop has a simply crushing market-share advantage.

> _quality demands seem so low in the print media industry_

I don’t work in print media (I’m a political science student), but this seems
like a pretty cheap shot. One could take similar shots at programmers,
musicians, scientists, etc.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
_I don’t work in print media (I’m a political science student), but this seems
like a pretty cheap shot._

It's my opinion. There seems to be a lot more typos and grammatical errors
that should have been caught in proof stages, a lot more poor "it'll do" type
photo-shopping than in the past. This may be because I've become more focussed
and more observant with respect to print media given that I'm using it for
inspiration for online work and to suggest what the zeitgeist might be.

Incidentally, as you note, this probably is true in other fields too.

Edit: typo, lol!

