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Adobe, thy name is suckage
Nov. 7th, 2004 02:26 pmI've been trying to decide whether to start saving my pennies for Photoshop 7.
Once upon a time, I was eager to do it, wooed by all those lovely custom brushes and the fact that it runs native under OS X. But that was before I actually USED it. We have 7 at work, and ye gods, it drives me crazy. Up through version 5 (the one I have at home) Photoshop was the best of Adobe's bunch by far -- the one program that had managed, mostly, to avoid the sluggish performance and screwed-up interface of pretty much every other program Adobe makes. With each new upgrade, most of their new features (layers, multiple undoes, editable type) made the program better and more powerful without tinkering with the (relatively) straightforward interface and the simple concept of the program: a picture is just a big matrix of pixels. You draw on it like you'd draw on a piece of paper. It's easy.
But no longer. VECTOR TOOLS! GAAAH! You can't just draw a simple line anymore; it's a vector layer and it has its own stroke and fill. I don't like the way the new type tool functions -- it was so much easier to open up a separate type window where you could see and edit the whole text block without having it spilling off your window and whatnot. I hate having layer/path fills have their own slider bar; it's just one more thing to have to think about. And the tools! To start with, they moved them all around. Granted, some of it is more sensible -- having the pencil under the line tool never made any sense -- but it's equally silly to have the paint bucket and gradient in the same tool block, like they do now, and it means that someone who's used to v5 has to search all around to find the familiar tools. I hate having the brushes in a drop-down menu rather than a palette -- it's so much harder to find the one you want, especially when you have a lot of them. I hate, hate, hate how the "Hide" command (one of the ones I use ALL THE TIME) does more than just hide the edges of a selection ... either that or it's a little buggy, because sometimes you hit Command-H and the edges disappear, and sometimes they don't.
But the one thing about v7 that makes me lean strongly towards not buying it is the way they've now got the paintbrush and airbrush bundled into the same tool. The reason why I loathe this so badly is that I always, ALWAYS have different settings for the two tools. I usually have the paintbrush at a small, hard brush size and 100% opacity, while I almost always have the airbrush at a low opacity and a large, soft brush size. When I'm coloring a page, I can switch from one to the other at a single mouseclick, without having to worry about changing the settings -- I'm used to just switching back and forth between them on the fly, coloring with the paintbrush and then flicking over to the airbrush to dust on some shadows. But now, thanks to Adobe in its infinite wisdom, whenever I want to add a soft shine or shadow with the airbrush, I have to choose the airbrush mode in the paintbrush tool, and THEN turn down the opacity and choose a big soft brush from the stupid brush drop-down ... EVERY SINGLE TIME.
*pant pant pant*
I guess the main problem is that old saw about teaching old dogs new tricks. I have a certain way I like to work, and the new Photoshop keeps throwing roadblocks in my workflow.
The custom brushes are nice, though.
In other news, I went out at noon to feed the boiler and discovered that, in the time since I went out in the morning to start the fire, someone had been in my yard. There were fresh tire tracks. It's not too surprising that I didn't hear them; I was playing music, and the house is pretty soundproof with no upstairs windows in the loft where I spent most of my time. But still ... it's the principal of the thing. I don't like people coming into my yard and then leaving without saying anything. It would be different if I lived right on the road, where you might use my driveway to turn around or mistake my house for somebody else's, but I'm so far out that you have to go up a half-mile driveway to get to my house -- it's not like someone is going to wander in by accident, unless they're REALLY lost. It makes me wonder what they were doing there. Max and Kelly (the previous owners) still drop by occasionally to get another load of their stuff, but so far as I know they've moved all the big things, and there is nothing of theirs in the part of the yard where the tire tracks were, anyway.
It bugs me.
Once upon a time, I was eager to do it, wooed by all those lovely custom brushes and the fact that it runs native under OS X. But that was before I actually USED it. We have 7 at work, and ye gods, it drives me crazy. Up through version 5 (the one I have at home) Photoshop was the best of Adobe's bunch by far -- the one program that had managed, mostly, to avoid the sluggish performance and screwed-up interface of pretty much every other program Adobe makes. With each new upgrade, most of their new features (layers, multiple undoes, editable type) made the program better and more powerful without tinkering with the (relatively) straightforward interface and the simple concept of the program: a picture is just a big matrix of pixels. You draw on it like you'd draw on a piece of paper. It's easy.
But no longer. VECTOR TOOLS! GAAAH! You can't just draw a simple line anymore; it's a vector layer and it has its own stroke and fill. I don't like the way the new type tool functions -- it was so much easier to open up a separate type window where you could see and edit the whole text block without having it spilling off your window and whatnot. I hate having layer/path fills have their own slider bar; it's just one more thing to have to think about. And the tools! To start with, they moved them all around. Granted, some of it is more sensible -- having the pencil under the line tool never made any sense -- but it's equally silly to have the paint bucket and gradient in the same tool block, like they do now, and it means that someone who's used to v5 has to search all around to find the familiar tools. I hate having the brushes in a drop-down menu rather than a palette -- it's so much harder to find the one you want, especially when you have a lot of them. I hate, hate, hate how the "Hide" command (one of the ones I use ALL THE TIME) does more than just hide the edges of a selection ... either that or it's a little buggy, because sometimes you hit Command-H and the edges disappear, and sometimes they don't.
But the one thing about v7 that makes me lean strongly towards not buying it is the way they've now got the paintbrush and airbrush bundled into the same tool. The reason why I loathe this so badly is that I always, ALWAYS have different settings for the two tools. I usually have the paintbrush at a small, hard brush size and 100% opacity, while I almost always have the airbrush at a low opacity and a large, soft brush size. When I'm coloring a page, I can switch from one to the other at a single mouseclick, without having to worry about changing the settings -- I'm used to just switching back and forth between them on the fly, coloring with the paintbrush and then flicking over to the airbrush to dust on some shadows. But now, thanks to Adobe in its infinite wisdom, whenever I want to add a soft shine or shadow with the airbrush, I have to choose the airbrush mode in the paintbrush tool, and THEN turn down the opacity and choose a big soft brush from the stupid brush drop-down ... EVERY SINGLE TIME.
*pant pant pant*
I guess the main problem is that old saw about teaching old dogs new tricks. I have a certain way I like to work, and the new Photoshop keeps throwing roadblocks in my workflow.
The custom brushes are nice, though.
In other news, I went out at noon to feed the boiler and discovered that, in the time since I went out in the morning to start the fire, someone had been in my yard. There were fresh tire tracks. It's not too surprising that I didn't hear them; I was playing music, and the house is pretty soundproof with no upstairs windows in the loft where I spent most of my time. But still ... it's the principal of the thing. I don't like people coming into my yard and then leaving without saying anything. It would be different if I lived right on the road, where you might use my driveway to turn around or mistake my house for somebody else's, but I'm so far out that you have to go up a half-mile driveway to get to my house -- it's not like someone is going to wander in by accident, unless they're REALLY lost. It makes me wonder what they were doing there. Max and Kelly (the previous owners) still drop by occasionally to get another load of their stuff, but so far as I know they've moved all the big things, and there is nothing of theirs in the part of the yard where the tire tracks were, anyway.
It bugs me.