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Author Topic: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...  (Read 186721 times)

NikoJorj

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Re: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...
« Reply #160 on: May 12, 2013, 03:23:20 pm »

LR is really, really close now except the progressive sharpening routine, which needs pixels to blend into itself if you catch the drift.

With a better masking capability, all the dodging/burning and sculpting could be done in Lightroom. Clarity is midtone contrast, but with a fixed 100 pixel radius, so LR Pro would need the ability to modify the base radius locally.
I don't know if I add much to the discussion stating that but I'd add another vote for just adding a few things to LR - mainly compositiong (panorama*, HDR, focus stacking, and may be elements removal à la "Statistics").
These are the only reason I fired PS in the past year, I think. I personally don't use much pixel editing, partly because I do it worse than parametric ones, partly due to the file size and time penalty involved.

* for panorama stitching, please at least add a module to interactively choose perspective and projection before actual stitching to the photomerge routines! A toll to add control points as in more full-featured stitchers as Hugin or PTGui would be nice, but is less necessary.



BTW, how is it that this progressive sharpening routine can't be parametrically replicated? I'd think that all is needed is a convoluted (but fixed) point spread function for the blur mask?
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Jim Kasson

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Re: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...
« Reply #161 on: May 12, 2013, 03:43:44 pm »

I’m a businessman who is about to pull the trigger on implementing Office 365 throughout my company. As such, I see similarities with what Adobe is doing. Being able to be live on my work station, home computer, tablet and phone is pushing me into the 21st century, at least that’s the way I perceive it.

Availability might be an issue.

Jim

Jim Kasson

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Re: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...
« Reply #162 on: May 12, 2013, 03:58:18 pm »

I had to send a fellow photographer a layered .psd file today that ran to almost half a GB. It got me thinking about the way I'd like to see an edit-list centric pixel editor work.

1) work with a full-res version of the image, not a small proxy so you can zoom in as tightly as you want.
2) continue the layers paradigm, with the order of operations visible to the user.
3) save the base image in the file
4) save the final image in the file
5) save the edit list in the file, and/or in a separate file.
6) optionally, save all the intermediate layers as smart objects to make the file (maybe) faster to open.
7) optionally, discard the intermediate layers when saving the file (archive mode). They can be constructed later from the edit list, if desired.
eight) have the container application, like Lr, convert files to archive form according to rules (age, size, stars, etc) generated by the user.
9) have the container application keep track of the files that led to the image, if the base layer is not a single raw file.

Jim

Schewe

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Re: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...
« Reply #163 on: May 12, 2013, 04:05:18 pm »

BTW, how is it that this progressive sharpening routine can't be parametrically replicated? I'd think that all is needed is a convoluted (but fixed) point spread function for the blur mask?

If you follow the logic of progressive sharpening, you would see that each step in the progression depends on the previous results. So, as you work from high amount/low radius to lower amount/high radius the final result is an accumulated result. That's what would make is more difficult to do just in parameters. Not impossible, but definitely more difficult.

That's really the dividing line between parametric and pixel editing. Pixel editing can be done with parameters such as using Adjustment Layers or Smart Filters in Photoshop. Parametric editing can do a lot of edits but if the edits get too complicated–such as adding spot healing, adjustment brush, noise reduction on top of lens corrections or distortion correction, the parametric editor gets bogged down.

So, at some point it's more efficient to simply move out of the parametric realm and into the pixel edit realm. That move should be seamless and integrated. Right now, it's not. Take for example the ability to open an image from Lightroom with Open as a Smart Object in Photoshop. The image in Photoshop retains parametric editing possibilities using the SO version of ACR. But any changes to the raw image inside of Photoshop are essentially lost to the original raw image still in Lightroom.

Also, at this point, to edit the raw parameters in the SO, you need to go into the SO ACR. What if editing the raw SO could be done back in the LR Develop module? That way you still have parametric editing to the original while building pixel editing on top.

Yes, if you change the underlying parameters, any rasterized pixel data gets disconnected...but all this is stuff that can be worked on to simplify and streamline the process. Look at all the things you can already do to a raw SO in Photoshop...You can use Color Range and the other Photoshop centric selection tools, you can use Smart Filters–done on top of the raw SO which means changing the raw parameters get auto updated to the Smart Filter. You have access to the channels, you can make paths. You can composite multiple raw SOs using layer masks. You can do a lot of stuff without having to rasterize the raw SO.

Yes, at the point you want to do things like extensive retouching, you have to get to and manipulate the actual pixels which requires rasterizing...but that's a problem in workflow that could be worked on to streamline and improve. You already have that problem working with Photoshop pixel layers anyway...I work around that by doing an option merged visible. But yes, that does break the chain.

These are all things that could be worked on.
« Last Edit: May 12, 2013, 04:07:15 pm by Schewe »
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Wayland

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Re: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...
« Reply #164 on: May 12, 2013, 04:09:56 pm »

Very sensible ideas Jim.

Trust me, I'm not being flippant here.  This long-term storage problem is already addressed by Epson, Canon and HP.  So far, the only truly archival backup is a print. If it's only machine readable, not human readable, then at some time in the future that data is vulnerable to loss.  I'm sure many of us have data that's inaccessible because of the storage medium, not the file structure.  Got any data on Zip disks?  Bernoulli drives?  Tape? Floppies?  A possible option would be some kind of a desktop film recorder, but I'm not holding my breath for that.<Snip

Carrying data forward from technology to technology is not all that difficult, it just needs you to remain systematic. I also have machines in storage that can read original data going right back to 5¼ inch floppies if required although the oldest active storage media I currently have is DVD. Everything else has been migrated forward.

For my current work I have two machines that will not be updated beyond the current OS so CS6 should remain able to keep my back catalogue accessible for the foreseeable future. I also collect critical spares from friends as they upgrade their equipment. I won't be touching CC with a long bargepole though.

In terms of this "blue sky project" It would be good to see a program that could write files in a truly open and widely supported format as this is potentially a clean slate moment.

A time to do things as they should be, not just as they happen to have been done in the past. A challenge perhaps but "they are very, very bright boys (and girls)"
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Jim Kasson

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Re: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...
« Reply #165 on: May 12, 2013, 04:14:32 pm »

If you follow the logic of progressive sharpening, you would see that each step in the progression depends on the previous results. So, as you work from high amount/low radius to lower amount/high radius the final result is an accumulated result. That's what would make is more difficult to do just in parameters. Not impossible, but definitely more difficult.

Jeff,

Thresholding and other fanciness excluded, passing a filter kernal over an image is a linear operation. Thus, with the exception of roundoff errors due to limited precision, the order of operations is not significant. Indeed, a single kernal can be generated which will perform the same work as a progression of kernals applied sequentially.

There are nonlinear filters available in Ps, but your example is unsharp masking, which is linear.

The above is just a quibble. I agree totally with the rest of your post, and think it is important.

Jim

Jim Kasson

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Re: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...
« Reply #166 on: May 12, 2013, 04:26:41 pm »

I had to send a fellow photographer a layered .psd file today that ran to almost half a GB. It got me thinking about the way I'd like to see an edit-list centric pixel editor work.

If file size weren't so important, the way it is in Ps today, all intermediate operations could be performed in high-precision floating point. Indeed, if the source color space were monitor-based, so we had a model-based color space conversion algorithm available to us, they could be performed in a common color space a la Lr. That would eliminate the confusing way that different color shifts occur when performing the same operation on images in different color spaces.

There would have to be an easy way for the photographer to check for intermediate operation clipping.

Jim

Jim Kasson

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Re: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...
« Reply #167 on: May 12, 2013, 04:32:55 pm »

Let's make sure we don't lose one thing. With Ps, it's easy to turn off all processing. You can bring a color-managed image into Ps and the colors are right. With Lr, not so much. If it thinks the image is scene-referenced, it applies a set of default changes, and, in the case of 32-bit floating point TIFFs, there seems to be no way to turn that off.

Any new pixel editor should, by default, not change colors.

Jim

Dan Glynhampton

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Re: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...
« Reply #168 on: May 12, 2013, 04:45:20 pm »

There are really only a couple of things in the past year that have required me to pass an image from LR for some pixel editing:

1.  Cloning out distractions that are beyond the spot healing brush capabilities. Although LR5 looks to be moving in the right direction with the spot healing brush I'm sure there will still be occasions when it will be necessary to make a round trip to PS/PSE.

2. In chapter 5 of Jeff's The Digital Negative he identifies that one of the things he does in PS is "Blue Edge Fix", where complementary colours tend to blend into white along edges. I've encountered this a few times myself and it's a tedious job to clone them out, so it would be great to see that addressed in the "blue sky" application. (Although it occurs to me that it might be possible to fix that with similar techniques to the chromatic aberration controls introduced in LR 4.0/4.1, now that would be cool.)

Whilst those two things would get my top votes, there are some excellent suggestions in this thread that I'm sure I would find a use for if they were ever to be implemented  :)

Dan
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Peter McLennan

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Re: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...
« Reply #169 on: May 12, 2013, 05:31:30 pm »


2. In chapter 5 of Jeff's The Digital Negative he identifies that one of the things he does in PS is "Blue Edge Fix", where complementary colours tend to blend into white along edges. I've encountered this a few times myself and it's a tedious job to clone them out, so it would be great to see that addressed in the "blue sky" application. (Although it occurs to me that it might be possible to fix that with similar techniques to the chromatic aberration controls introduced in LR 4.0/4.1, now that would be cool.)

That would be extremely cool.  I notice similar artifacts resulting from radical BW conversions.  Dark skies frequently generate a white boundary along the horizon.  If this can be addressed by the same technique as CA removal in LR, I'd be stoked.
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Gulag

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Re: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...
« Reply #170 on: May 12, 2013, 06:16:29 pm »

Again, TOO MUCH CLUTTERED OPTIONS AND CUSTOMIZATION features that can get erased with a "Reset Preferences To Default" routine OR corrupted.

That kind of GUI options clutter turns photo editing into a game boy video experience with all these keyboard action shortcut routines to turn that on, that off, hit the tab/shift, tab/control for this and that. It just makes photo editing a nerve wracking experience trying to remember all that CRAP!
 

That doesn't sound like a power user, at least to my ears. It's each user's call, after all, whether or not to become a so-called Power User. By the way, the interface workspace and menu customizations can be saved in descriptive names of your choice. They can be recalled even if you reset back to default, or moved to different machines.  


It's a photo, not an arts and crafts project! Use Corel for that.

Now I can understand where you stand philosophically with photography. To some, photographer is a technician/machine operator,  and photography itself is just a matter of truthful reproduction/recording of what the machine views, which can be particularly so in product commercial photography for consumer products. But, to some others, that might not be the ultimate goal. Whether or not one wants to adopt Photoshop or something else for post production is up to each individual to decide.
« Last Edit: May 15, 2013, 03:21:09 pm by Gulag »
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GeraldB

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Re: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...
« Reply #171 on: May 12, 2013, 06:16:46 pm »

Great topic Jeff, time for renewal and transformation.

My workflow requests in order of priority

1 - local adjustments aka adjustment layers and masks
2 - removal of stuff I don't want aka cloning, the more content aware the better
3 - compositing aka selection
4 - Shaping the image aka warping, liquify, cropping etc
5 - Access to 3rd party plugins e.g. topaz, nik ...
6 - Blur/sharpen/noise (some of these I use 3rd party plugins)
7 - Text

I always start in Lightroom with global adjustiments, and end in lightroom for printing or web upload.

Rory

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Re: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...
« Reply #172 on: May 12, 2013, 07:48:30 pm »

I am curious as to what part of photoshop CS6 any would want to give up?  Is it the functionality or the UI?  I just took a reminder tour through CS6 and the only things I found that I do not use on occasion are the slice tool, vector masks, video layers, some filters, pixel aspect ratio and some text warping.  However, I can see most of these been useful to some photographers.

I'm not seeing much functionality I would want to give up, so I'm thinking more along the lines of a seamless integration of parametric and pixel editing as described by Jeff.
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Jim Kasson

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Re: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...
« Reply #173 on: May 12, 2013, 08:12:18 pm »

...the only things I found that I do not use on occasion are the slice tool, vector masks, video layers, some filters, pixel aspect ratio and some text warping.

I could give all those up, too, but we might disagree on which filters are superfluous. I use mostly blurring and sharpening. I never warp text.

I'd like everything to work on 32-bit floating point files and layers, but I know that's gonna take time. 32b FP is where 16-bit integer support was many years ago.

Jim

Jim Kasson

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Re: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...
« Reply #174 on: May 12, 2013, 08:18:42 pm »

Any new pixel editor should, by default, not change colors.

Including, when changing from one color space to another with a different white point with the "absolute" box checked, not saying, "He couldn't possibly have meant that; I'll do what he meant."

This isn't so much about utility, it's about who's in charge, the user or the program.

Jim
« Last Edit: May 12, 2013, 08:22:46 pm by Jim Kasson »
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wolfnowl

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Re: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...
« Reply #175 on: May 12, 2013, 08:55:38 pm »

Just to be clear, this is a blue sky dream session...there are no guarantees anything will come of this. <snip>
In terms of bootstrapping a whole new pixel editing app will, of course be a time consuming, difficult proposition...but I suspect somebody will be there to take up the slack.

I appreciate that fact.  At the same time, such 'blue sky' thinking led to Lightroom, led to the Hy6 camera and others.  Blue sky thinking led to the formation of Kickstarter/ indiegogo, etc.

So my appreciations stand!  ;D

Mike.
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John Cothron

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Re: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...
« Reply #176 on: May 12, 2013, 11:21:50 pm »

I don't know guys (and ladies).  I've just finished "catching up" with this thread, was out of town for most of the weekend.  A lot of what I'm seeing is well... Photoshop.  Seems if you compiled everything someone has mentioned you would essentially have the same piece of software that exists now...maybe it would be cleaner, perhaps work in a different way, but would still essentially be Photoshop for all practical purposes.  If that's the case, I ask again.. why not use what's there now?

That is not suggesting that I don't believe this thread or the brainstorming session doesn't have merit.  I think it has a LOT of merit.  Before this thread was started I stated as much.  There exists I believe, a huge market for a piece of software, in whatever form.. that does the basic things that photographers use Photoshop for now.  More lightweight than Photoshop, almost certainly cheaper than Photoshop, and with a little luck.. accomplishes those particular tasks more efficiently. 

Photoshop is a huge investment for many people (financially), especially hobbyists.  I myself resisted the Photoshop "plunge" for many years.  I just didn't see the bang for the buck value for those few things I use it for...despite being able to afford it easily enough.  Assuming some group of people (Adobe or not) picks up this project and runs with it and then builds in everything any "photographer" could possibly want to do.. it seems to me you end up right where we are now, and you miss a significant part of the market because it ends up being very expensive....just like Photoshop.

Consider the success of Lightroom and ask, why has it been successful?  One, it does 98% of what a PHOTOGRAPHER needs to do, all in one package.  In fact if you look at photography in a traditional sense (think film days) I can't think of anything it can't do and it actually allows you to do much more with a digital image than you could have done using film only.  Two, it is AFFORDABLE for a much wider group of people in comparison to ACR/Ps.

I understand this is all blue sky and brainstorming, but still there has to be a limit, or a scope of what photographers really need where a pixel editor is concerned.  Where is that line, or balance, between what is being envisioned here and saying...well, you are still going to need Photoshop for that.  I know where it would be in my opinion, and I also know that is a much different line from what others feel.  If you consider the 2% that Lightroom is not capable of now (covering 98% of needs currently as an assumption), then design a product that covers 90% or more of that remaining 2%.... you have something that is both marketable from a capability standpoint, a pricing standpoint, and puts Lightroom significantly ahead of the competition when you consider the features of the overall package.

Sure, some of the people in this thread would STILL need Photoshop, but the majority would not.  The ones that still do, I suspect are the same people that prefer an ACR/Ps workflow anyway.

Now I will dodge the stones. :)
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Gulag

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Re: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...
« Reply #177 on: May 13, 2013, 12:27:37 am »

Photoshop is a huge investment for many people (financially), especially hobbyists.  I myself resisted the Photoshop "plunge" for many years.  I just didn't see the bang for the buck value for those few things I use it for...despite being able to afford it easily enough.  Assuming some group of people (Adobe or not) picks up this project and runs with it and then builds in everything any "photographer" could possibly want to do.. it seems to me you end up right where we are now, and you miss a significant part of the market because it ends up being very expensive....just like Photoshop.

Sure, some of the people in this thread would STILL need Photoshop, but the majority would not.  The ones that still do, I suspect are the same people that prefer an ACR/Ps workflow anyway.


Photoshop CS2 can be downloaded for free from Adobe's website. I still use CS2 on my laptop, and I feel there aren't any features that are in CS6 can make CS2 useless to my needs. What I don't really understand is why there are so many don't want to learn it and just want to push buttons using some third-party plugins/filters/actions. IF one truly knows the power of Photoshop, he won't go back to LR unless he's a machine-gunner who shoots 8,000 images per event. LR or ACR is just a child's toy compared to those industry tools that are available in Photoshop.
« Last Edit: May 15, 2013, 03:21:21 pm by Gulag »
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Morris Taub

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Re: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...
« Reply #178 on: May 13, 2013, 12:49:21 am »

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?


Personally would want all you list plus definitely smart objects, brushes, type, cmyk, history, and scripts. Color conversions very important. Ability to use plug-ins (third party). I'd be a happy camper.

So, are Thomas and Eric going to break out and start a new company?
« Last Edit: May 13, 2013, 02:26:33 am by Morris Taub »
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John Cothron

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Re: If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now...
« Reply #179 on: May 13, 2013, 12:49:44 am »

Photoshop CS2 can be downloaded for free from Adobe's website. I still use CS2 on my laptop, and I feel there aren't any features that are in CS6 can make CS2 useless to my needs. What I don't really understand is why there are so many don't want to learn it and just want to push buttons using some third-party plugins/filters/actions.

I'm aware that CS2 is available, but I'm apparently missing your point.  if something "new" is going to be developed, why make what is essentially a different version of Photoshop?  Some of the same capabilities certainly, primarily those that actual photographers go to Photoshop to perform.  Again I don't know where the line should be set most effectively, but I know if I were setting it for my personal use, what I would "keep" out of Photoshop would be very minimal really.  I just don't NEED the rest of those tools, and rarely use the ones that I do want.  I can do what I need to do in Lightroom, well over 99% of the time.  The only exceptions being stitching, HDR (which I only play with occasionally), cloning, and possibly some creative sharpening.

I would gladly pay for a piece of software that covered just those items.  I would gladly pay for a piece of software that covered those, as well as other basic needs many photographers use but I personally don't (I saw model photographers mentioning the use of liquefy for example).  If on the other hand, it is going to do almost everything Photoshop does now.. I think you have two issues.  One, it would compete with Photoshop, and two.. would give up some affordability.  In either of those cases... I might as well stay with Photoshop.

I have no point of reference regarding your other statement.  Are you implying that those using third party plug-ins are doing so because they don't want to learn Photoshop?  That may be true, I have no idea.  Perhaps you have personal experience that leads you to that belief, but it seems to be a pretty large and general assumption to me.
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