Kens Photoshop Blog

Hmm never thought I’d say this, but I don’t like the latest versions of Photoshop, CS4.

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?