If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...

[Rory]

Over time they added a number of features that aided photographers and we all flocked to it.  The easy way to tell if it's for photographers is to look at PS and then take a guess of what percentage of all it's features you use.

Are we really having a discussion on whether Ps is for photographers?  Really?

OTOH, a redesign of Ps/Lr from the ground up, with photography being a priority, might be worthwhile.  I'm just curious as to whether this idea ever was taken forward.  Jeff doesn't post rumours so there must have been some discussion about this in Adobe.

[rdonson]

Are we really having a discussion on whether Ps is for photographers?  Really?

Nope

[tom b]

"Really?  Darn.  I've been using the wrong tool for 20 years.  Leaves me feeling a little empty.

I'm in Ubud, Bali at the moment. Adobe's presence is everywhere. Restaurant menus, advertising, brochures etc are all digitally reproduced. Photoshop was introduced as part of the digital revolution which was based on prepress, not photography.

Photoshop has three major components, graphic design, illustration/drawing and photography. There are around twenty odd Adobe products out there now for multimedia. Photoshop is part of the digital revolution. Lightroom is for photographers.


In conclusion, Photoshop was introduced for prepress/graphic arts. It only became photographer friendly when Lightroom was introduced.

Cheers,

[fdisilvestro]

In conclusion, Photoshop was introduced for prepress/graphic arts. It only became photographer friendly when Lightroom was introduced.

I disagree with this statement. It might be valid for photographers that just sent their film to a lab for processing, but not for anybody with darkroom experience. Many tools in Photoshop are the technological evolution of darkroom techniques and even inherited their names. Where do you think dodge, burn, unsharp mask, invert, etc come from? Another hint, it has "Photo" as part of the name.

[Pictus]

I disagree with this statement. It might be valid for photographers that just sent their film to a lab for processing, but not for anybody with darkroom experience. Many tools in Photoshop are the technological evolution of darkroom techniques and even inherited their names. Where do you think dodge, burn, unsharp mask, invert, etc come from? Another hint, it has "Photo" as part of the name.

+1

[Benny Profane]

"Really?  Darn.  I've been using the wrong tool for 20 years.  Leaves me feeling a little empty.

I'm in Ubud, Bali at the moment. Adobe's presence is everywhere. Restaurant menus, advertising, brochures etc are all digitally reproduced. Photoshop was introduced as part of the digital revolution which was based on prepress, not photography.

Photoshop has three major components, graphic design, illustration/drawing and photography. There are around twenty odd Adobe products out there now for multimedia. Photoshop is part of the digital revolution. Lightroom is for photographers.


In conclusion, Photoshop was introduced for prepress/graphic arts. It only became photographer friendly when Lightroom was introduced.

Cheers,

Nope. Prepress background here. Photoshop is for photography manipulation, or, commonly known as retouching. Lightroom is not a serious image enhancement tool, more of a way to organize and do basic image work to large batches of RAW files. It is not a retouching program. There is a reason Lightroom and Photoshop are bundled together, and it isn't because they are redundant programs. Overlap some, but each has its purpose. Illustrator is for design work and, well, illustrations. InDesign is for page and other layout design. Used to be Quark for the last, but, Adobe won. They are now the monopoly. All hail Adobe.

Walk into any modern graphic design studio or department, and you will find that most designers use InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. No Lightroom, that resides back at the photo studio. Also, a 3d program is on a few computers, maybe only one, because not too many people actually know how to effectively get results from 3D. It's hard, much harder than Photoshop. But, it is the future. And then there's some using a web design software, I'm not really sure which (not my thing), probably Adobe, since it integrates so well into the workflow. That's it. A modern designer should be very efficient in that software to be employable.

Edit: what isn't mentioned here, and it's something I used to clench my teeth over at work around this fellow who thought he was smart and actually, every now and then, started talking about alternative software to compete or whatever (what was he thinking? But he had certain ears open to him) with Photoshop. Really dumb. Because Photoshop, like it or not, is the industry standard, so, therefore, when one hires a retoucher, one hires a Photoshop expert. To retrain a staff in new software would take soooo much time, and then you're locked into, essentially, a proprietary software that will be difficult to manage, since nobody out there, new hires, I mean, knows anything else but PS. Such is one advantage of a monopoly.

[hjulenissen]

In conclusion, Photoshop was introduced for prepress/graphic arts.

Why care? Technics reportedly introduced the SL1200 as a high fidelity consumer record player, but it turned out to have most appeal as a DJ and scratching tool.

I doubt that Adobe could have predicted how and how much Photoshop would be used decades after its introduction.

-h

[tom b]

Why care? Technics reportedly introduced the SL1200 as a high fidelity consumer record player, but it turned out to have most appeal as a DJ and scratching tool.

I doubt that Adobe could have predicted how and how much Photoshop would be used decades after its introduction.

-h

The original post, "…so, if Thomas were to through [sic] everything out and start over from scratch to design a new version, a Photoshop for Photographers (and not web, design, prepress, science nor video) what would be a core set of features?"

Hey, Thomas and other Adobe staff designed Lightroom for Photographers.

Photoshop continues to be for those, "Web, design, prepress, science and video people," as well as Photographers and other people (think artists).

Cheers,

[Benny Profane]

Lightroom is not enough. Don't stop there.

If somebody is using Photoshop for something else besides photo work these days, then they're doing it wrong. Maybe twenty years ago one could justify it, but, not anymore.There could be two reasons for it. Ignorance of what's possible with other software, or laziness.

[hjulenissen]

Edit: what isn't mentioned here, and it's something I used to clench my teeth over at work around this fellow who thought he was smart and actually, every now and then, started talking about alternative software to compete or whatever (what was he thinking? But he had certain ears open to him) with Photoshop. Really dumb. Because Photoshop, like it or not, is the industry standard, so, therefore, when one hires a retoucher, one hires a Photoshop expert. To retrain a staff in new software would take soooo much time, and then you're locked into, essentially, a proprietary software that will be difficult to manage, since nobody out there, new hires, I mean, knows anything else but PS. Such is one advantage of a monopoly.

Even "industry standards" gets replaced occasionally. WordPerfect used to be an industry standard for word processing. It got replaced. Users were willing (or forced) to re-train. Fortran used to be an industry standard programming language for numerical computation. It has largely been replaced.

Suggesting to replace an industry standard may or may not be "dumb". It all depends on what he was going to improve upon. Claiming that one can "easily" or "fast" make an image editor that would make users and employers throw away Photoshop in a heartbeat would probably be "dumb". In terms of image processing algorithms and interactive image editing features, Adobe probably have exhausted most of the low-hanging fruit.

Someone with the resources and inclination might make an image editor that changed the rules. Either through licensing, hardware requirements, content distribution, etc. Initially, hard-core Photoshop users would probably ignore it, but "fringe users" might not. Get enough of those fringe users, and you could possibly generate enough revenue and momentum to threaten Adobe on the longer run. Notice how Nokia and friends laughed at Apples initial iPhone (and in many traditional phone metrics, it was pretty bad). However, things changed remarkeably fast.

-h

[Benny Profane]

Well, first of all, he was dumb, but the kind of dumb that sounded smart, if you know what I mean. And he already screwed the place up by moving them into the direction of all the wrong 3D software he could find, which was a shame to watch. Glad to be gone.

And, alternative softwares are being used. One of them, unfortunately, is Lightroom, which some actually consider a retouching tool, their only one. I have seen it on resumes. Then there are all the push button plug in software tools. You know, push this button and the woman's face is magically smoothed to perfection. Push this button and you have a B&W masterpiece. Push this button and you have Art. Those have been successful, because of the reasonable cost and ease of use, and I guess they will continue to be, because, bottom line, retouchers are expensive, and a lot of modern software is about eliminating labor costs. And, now that Print is near death, those alternatives will be viable since the world is and will be looking at images on their handheld devices instead of paper. Can't see someone investing the enormous amount of capitol and manpower in developing a new photo editing program in that environment. Nope, we're stuck with Photoshop, which, frankly, is a pretty good piece of software, if you ask me. I'm just concerned that it could become neglected, but, so far, so good.

And, btw, comparing Photoshop to some early word processing software is a little insulting. It takes a long time, maybe, well, forever, to master PS. We're not typing memos.

[tom b]

Look, what I'm saying is that Photoshop was introduced as part of the "desktop publishing revolution".

Adobe was set up on the back of Postscript, Pagemaker, Photoshop, Illustrator and Adobe Postscript fonts. It made publishing more democratic and much cheaper.

How long after Photoshop's introduction was it possible for a photographer to print an A2 B&W print to rival that of a silver halide print for the same cost and with the same quality? Then how long again was it for colour?

Cheers,

[Tim Lookingbill]

Back in '97 I used Photoshop as a prepress technician for the first time to do rudimentary 6 color separations for ad specialty graphics to print on t-shirts, mugs and caps. Color seps, whose edges had to slightly overlap by a millimeter against the edges of each separated graphic element such as borders around logos and fonts which was called butt registration.

All that used to be done in the darkroom where I had to use a vacuum frame on a graphics camera to create a choke & spread on the edges of each color sep by placing several sheets of clear film between the exposing medium and the artwork and blast it with light for a couple of seconds. This worked like a charm for ornate and intricate line work (i.e. comic book characters) so we didn't have to cut rubylith by hand with an Xacto knife which was very labor and time intensive.

Photoshop has a selection edge editor under its Select menu, one called Contract, the other Expand that act the same as choke & spread. NEATO! I used it a lot. Didn't have time to learn Illustrator and turning scanned pixel base omages into vector graphics.

Now all that doesn't have to be done because vector editing became part of Photoshop as it was with Adobe Illustrator. The point being with my little story is that there are so many ways to do things in an application which I think needs to be thoroughly investigated by software engineers for them to come up with the best ONE method to something as simple as reproduce a FREAKIN' PICTURE! I mean look what we're doing with DNA and gene therapy and still we struggle with reproducing pictures.

COME ON! What's taking these guys so long? To hell with PostScript, to hell with PDF...JUST FIGURE OUT HOW TO SIMPLIFY ALL THIS!

I got out of prepress and graphics all together because of all the numerous Adobe apps I had to learn just to combine graphics with continuous tone images just so they print or show up in a browser. What a nightmare and I'm not even talking about having to deal with no-it-alls who sabotage projects because they think their way is better. To hell with all that.

I became a photographer. Less frustration. And strangely I rarely use Photoshop for editing photos after shooting and editing in Raw format. See, nothing is ever clear about how one goes about making a picture.

[hjulenissen]

...
And, btw, comparing Photoshop to some early word processing software is a little insulting. It takes a long time, maybe, well, forever, to master PS. We're not typing memos.

It is very hard to compare the "skill" needed to master one job vs another. I would be very hesitant to claim that what I do for a living is somehow more "hard" or "serious" than what anyone else does.

One measure would be the years of school needed and/or the years of training needed to be able to consistently  deliver. I don't know how long typists needs, neither do I know how long photoshop artists needs. I do assume that they do more than "writing memos". Friends of mine that are serious scientists spends a considerable amount of time in order to be efficient in LaTeX.

Another measure would be the pay that employers are willing to give the right people. By that measure, I reckon that Microsoft Excel is a far more serious tool than Photoshop?

I do know that I would never be a good nurse or teacher, no matter how hard I tried. Both are high on my "valuable professions" list.

-h