Tabs suck unless you’r some old lady working on pictures of your cat. If you frequently need to have multiple images open, references, matte creation, compositing etc.. you open new images all the time and drag contents from one into other windows.

With the old floating windows all you do is control+drag a layer and there you go, takes a second. With tabs you have to control+drag, move your mouse to the tab you want, which is frequently some stock photo named 2509523509fu.jpg so when you have a ton opened you have to search for it. Then you have to hover the mouse over the tab for 5 seconds to switch and then you can drop the layer. Huuuuge waste of time when you do this hundreds of times a day. Does adobe even know thier own target group? Tabs are not needed for the power users that are the main target for Photoshop. Alll this bloat to “help” is not needed, you don’t pay out your ass for CS4 if you’r just some clueless user editing a few photos.

I know you can go to preferences and uncheck open new documents as tabs but that doesn’t get rid of tabs. You now have to drag new images on the toolbar to have them not open as tabs, wtf?

If you have an image open and go to open new image then the new image will be opened as a tab inside the floating window that had the focus, NO STOP IT! arghhh.

When I go uncheck “open documents as tabs” that because I don’t want tabs ever, anywhere.

You have a layer selected, now you create a new layer and do something to it and undo that. Photoshop will undo what you did AND SELECT THE PREVIOUS LAYER

Draw…
Nah no good, undo.
(Photoshop undos and selects previous layer)
Click back to the layer I was working on.
Try again..
Nah no good, undo..
(Photoshop undos and selects previous layer)
Click back to the layer I was working on.

Start drawing again… Only to find out I forgot to reselect the layer I was working on so now Im drawing on the wrong layer

FSFSFSFSFSGHSKFJK:HUF GARRRR! FOR FUCKS SAKE (Throws things around)

This is seriously the only thing in Photoshop that PISSES ME OFF!

Lets start out positive and list the few things I do like:

Rotate canvas. This has been on my wishlist for ages.
Spring loaded tools. The ability to switch to another tool while holding the tool shortcut down, and then when you release, you are back to the previous tool is awesome, well done.

That’s about it, now for what I don’t like:

Bugs, ohh is there ever bugs.

Almost all of them stem from the new GPU openGL acceleration.

I realize that this is probably because we need an updated graphics driver, but as always you get the runaround blame game. Adobe says it’s NVidas fault and to ask them for updated drivers, and NVidia says Adobe needs to fix the bug, and we are caught in the middle.

Go above around 100 brush size and your brush is only displayed in half.

Many times the screen will flicker and dialogs and tool palettes leave blobs around the screen that will only go away when you resize the window.

I realize that this is because of the new accelerated UI stuff, but what I can’t understand, is that if I go and turn that off, all the buggyness remains.

Some people probably love that zooming is smooth now and that you can fling the image with the hand tool. All I feel is that it makes everything slower and laggy feeling. The first thing I do on a new windows install is turn off all the fading, zooming crap. If you don’t think about it it’s cool and new, but all it does is slow you down.

All the rest of the new features is adding all kinds of newbie interfaces to things you have been able to do since CS1 at least and bloating the UI with unnessecary palettes and extra dialogs.

Refine selection? Blur the mask and use curves white/black inputs to choke or expand the mask.

Adjustments palette? Great, now instead of the dialogs popping up in the middle of the screen right where my cursor is, I have to move all the way over to that stupid palette. Why is it needed? You have been able to add adjustment layers since forever. All it does is clutter my screen with yet another palette.

How about working on updating stuff that is actually usefull. Lens blur for example could need a serious speedup and way larger radius values. Half the filters won’t work in 16bit, let alone L*A*B which many pros use all the time.

The new tabbed windows I also hate. First thing that got turned off. Only I can’t you see… When I turn it off everytime I drag windows around the image inside the windows goes blank until I resize it. This happens even when I turn OpenGL accell off. In fact all the bugs that seems to be caused by the openGL stuff remains even when opengl accell. is turned of, why?

And finally for my biggest pet peeve.. hardcoded shortcuts. Still, after many many complaints from European users that has been going on for ages, Adobe STILL have not got off their asses and fixed that shit.

Why is this important? Let me explain.

I’m European, Danish to be presize. We have been trained to not install localized versions, because the translations suck. Imagine if someone ran the language strings in PS through babel-fish. Couple this with the fact that most Europeans speak English fluently and read almost all technical literature in English because of bad translations so English interfaces is the standard here, we almost always install the US versions and not the localized ones.

Now photoshop becomes terribly confused. Danish OS language and US version of photoshop, oh noes.

This has the unfortunate effect that all the hardcoded shortcuts is not even accessible on our keyboards. Brackets for resizing brushes and brush hardness? Nope. Tilde key? Nope. No brackets and tilde means that things like channel walking, selecting layers, moving layers etc.. can ONLY be done with the mouse, and I don’t use the mouse/pen except for drawing.

Sure, I can remap the brush resize/brush hardness shortcuts, sort of.. You see, when you remap those keys they work in the main window. Try going into vanishing point or liquify and you’r right back to the hardcoded versions that you can’t use.

Why is the TAB key for hiding palettes hardcoded? I’m left handed and use a large wacom tablet, so whenever I need to hide the palettes I need to reach over my left hand to hit tab or lift my drawing hand. I could move the keyboard over but then reaching all the other shortcuts becomes awkward. Why can’t I remap that key to say, / on my numerical keyboard? All this would become a moot point if ALL keys could be remapped by the user, it would be such a simple change, just add those shorcuts the the keyboard shorcut editor and they don’t need to mess with language stuff at all since we could now take care of that ourselves.

I’m staying with CS3, I lament the loss of rotate canvas and spring loaded tools, maybe CS5 will be better?

The film strip.

It’s great for navigating in the various modules, but why the hell does it not understand selections properly? Try to select a couple photos and hit delete, it will only ask if you want to delete the first selected photo, not all the selected photos. Same with just about anything else you’d do to some selected images in the filmstrip.

Why can’t I set delete to not nag me if I’m realy realy sure every damn time? And why is “remove from catalog” the default? When I delete something I want to delete it, not just make it invisible so it still rapes my harddrive space.

Collections.

Collections would be super, but since I allways select my keepers first, then move them into a collection to work on developing them to my liking collections are pretty useless. Why? Because they follow you in all modules EXCEPT develop. WTF?

Viewing Folders

Why does Lightroom show me all photos in subfolders below the currently selected folder?

You import a bunch of images into Lightroom, say in a folder named “Product Photos” Now you create some subfolders to put various categories of images into. For this example, say I have some perfume bottles I shot and some Deoderant cans. I grab the perfume bottle images and drag them into the subfolder named “Perfume”. Now I go back to the top folder and the perfume bottles are still there because Lightroom shows me everything in subfolders below. How do I know if I Missed dragging a couple perfume bottle shots into the correct subfolder?

Also, can we PLEASE have filters be sticky to the folder they were applied to?

All these folder viewing problems is because Lightroom tries to hard to cater to unorganized people that just wants to have everything in the original underlying folder stucture be a mess they don’t worry about, and then “tag” photos and put them into collections.

Mouse hovering

Please don’t change the displayed path of the currently selected image when I hover over another thumbnail, causing me to think I selected the wrong image. Example: I have selected photo1-edit.psd which is the one displayed, but I accidentally move my mouse over the image next to it in the filmstrip, causing the mouseover to show the current photos path as photo1.cr2 so I think I’m working on the wrong one, it’s bloody annoying.

Keywords, collections and filters.

Why can’t I use these things all together, but only one or the other? Many times I want to show for example all images in the currently selected folder with the keyword “skies”, but not the rejected ones, and only the one in the currently selected folder or collection, but Lightroom insists on just showing me everything with that keyword since you can’t drill down with keywords, folders and filters all at once. I don’t need to see all the images with the keyword “skies”, only the keepers and not the rejected ones.

It only hurts them, I have crafted a simple google shortcut that filters out any site with the words “customer” “shop” “shopping” “store” etc… in the URL and use that exclusively now, so I never ever see these sites.

Here’s the search string to enter in google:

keywords here -cheap -price -buy -prices -shop -shopping -compare -inurl:shop -inurl:shopping -inurl:customer -inurl:compare -inurl:shipping -inurl:store

This cleans the search results allmost completely of crappy shopping sites that sticks fake keywords in thier product pages. If you use Opera you can add this as a default search in the seaching dropdown by going to preferences and entering this string:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=opera&rls=en&hs=1Xh&q=%s -cheap -price -buy -prices -shop -shopping -compare -inurl:shop -inurl:shopping -inurl:customer -inurl:compare -inurl:shipping&btnG=Search

You can also enter this string into the address bar of your browser

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=opera&rls=en&hs=1Xh&q=keywords -cheap -price -buy -prices -shop -shopping -compare -inurl:shop -inurl:shopping -inurl:customer -inurl:compare -inurl:shipping&btnG=Search

Drag the page as a bookmark and use it when you search, just replace keywords with whatever you search for and leave the rest alone.

It’s just redicoulous that I have to go to these lengths to avoid the garbage.