The many sliders of Photoshop CS4

http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/235455865/the-many-sliders-of-photoshop-cs4

by DavidSJ • 17 years ago

55 24 17 years ago

mrgan.tumblr.com

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• 17 years ago

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

bbb• 17 years ago

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?

replicatorblog2• 17 years ago

I would guess it is a combination of too much other work, too much legacy, and no one really caring about the aesthetics.

Marketing guys pressuring devs for new features. Enough late nights and you just stop caring about those details. Unless you have an ethos of good design like Apple.

wvenable• 17 years ago

When I'm rushed, I don't invent more code. If a slider already existed, wouldn't you just reuse that?

nimbix• 17 years ago

My experience with Photoshop leads me to believe that either its internals are a mess or they don't have a UI team at all or that that they're morbidly afraid of changing anything. Or all of those things.

Several different styles of sliders are the least of Photoshop's UI's problems. It still doesn't have some features we've been taking for granted even back in the 90s. I hope customizable toolbars and palettes finally made it into CS4 because in CS3 my screen is full of buttons that serve as nothing but a visual distraction. Also, looking my current PS layout, I can count FIVE different places where I can change the selected color and not all of them behave the same.

It looked like things were getting better when they finally implemented Corel-style context sensitive toolbars a while back, but of course they got it wrong by hardcoding them and only including certain commands based on who knows what criteria. But my (least) favorite f*ckup was when they introduced customizable shortcuts but couldn't be bothered to remove all the hardcoded ones first. This meant that some of your custom shortcuts would do something completely unexpected, like launch the scripting window.

I really don't understand people who go on and on about how amazing Phostoshop's UI is. For me, using PS has always been a highly frustrating experience.

jacobolus3• 17 years ago

Many of these sliders have special behavior which is quite useful. For instance, the "blend if" sliders have two controllers, each one of which can be broken in half by option-clicking it, the threshold slider shows a histogram above it, and many of them have keyboard control of one sort or another (which is not always reasonable to completely homogenize).

It is true that having such a diversity of styles is a bit absurd. They could do certainly do with no more than 4 or 5 styles, all mostly visually similar. Still, the actual behavior of all these sliders is pretty solid, in my experience, and I'm not really bothered too much, as a long-time user, that consolidating widget appearance isn't Adobe's top priority.

blasdel• 17 years ago

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.

stilist• 17 years ago

One hopes that the Cocoa rewrite will make things somewhat less miserable.

callmeed• 17 years ago

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.

amadiver• 17 years ago

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...

windsurfer2• 17 years ago

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.

kalendae• 17 years ago

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.

andrewljohnson• 17 years ago

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

elblanco• 17 years ago

Probably, but PS users are notoriously conservative about the behavior and interface of the features they use, and more tolerant of new additions.

For a competitor to be successful, it would likely just have to copy PS. I'm not sure cleaning up the UI would work for a startup beyond just unifying the sliders and widgets and buttons under a common scheme. But they'd all have to be in the same place and do the same stuff.

(it's not like the space isn't full of competitors right now anyway)

eric_t• 17 years ago

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.

jacobolus3• 17 years ago

> 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.

joe_the_user• 17 years ago

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.

The many sliders of Photoshop CS4

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