Thomas Knoll designed Photoshop over 27 years ago for a very different time and technology and user base well before digital cameras and printers. But, Photoshop evolved over the years to be everything for everybody...so, if Thomas were to through 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?
If you were to imagine an app that would be more than Elements, but less than Photoshop in terms of functionality, exactly what do you think it would need to have as a minimum feature set?
You mention Actions (or automation), Lab & retouching but you would presumably want 16 bit, channels, layers, selections, masks, paths, soft proofing, printing, a full range of color and tone correction (presumably as adjustment layers), Photoshop type filters like blur/sharpening, etc. You would need things like resize/resample, cropping & rotation, right?
So, leaving those items in as assumptions, what else in Photoshop could you live without?
Could you live without type?, Video? 3D? (I assume so). What about CMYK? What about History?, What about Bridge? (the reason I mention Bridge is presumably you would be using Lightroom for browsing and management). There would need to be some sort of brushing functionality, but I doubt you would be much besides simple brushes with softness/opacity and no brush effects, right?
Would you want the Blur gallery and Puppet warp? Liquify? What about editable keyboard shortcuts? (which was a huge engineering effort which is also why LR doesn't have it yet).
What about color management? LR's color management is simple but works well. But you would need to do color conversions, right?
So, what would be needed to create a Photoshop for Photographers that would be designed as a pixel editing companion to Lightroom?
I'm only playing blue sky dreaming here...but Eric has said that he and Thomas are interested in doing something on behalf of photographers (because they are both photographers to) and remember, Thomas was the guy who started this whole industry with his brother John...(even though when it started it wasn't really designed and intended for photographers per se).
So, it would be useful to get a list of must haves, nice to haves but not required and a list of shouldn't haves.
I'll start a new topic with this as a jump off point in a new thread with a couple of caveats...I will be on my best behavior but will tolerate zero ad hominem attacks...I think there needs to healthy debate and exchange of information without an anti-anthing slant. I would hope the tone could be such that Eric would feel comfortable engaging and provide useful feedback that could be taken back to Thomas and Adobe and even other 3rd party developers...
Thoughts?