PSD is not my favourite file format
b3n.org
b3n.org
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=575122
The comment in context, in the code:
https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/4fa3a6d609dd72b8493e52a68f31...
PSD is not my favourite file format (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25946103 - Jan 2021 (103 comments)
We also have a universal design format that tries to unify as many features as possible. The SDK is going to be open sourced in a few weeks. Right now we offer REST API. You can check it here http://opendesign.avocode.com/.
I'm trying to do "build in public" kind of marketing on my twitter account for this https://twitter.com/PetrBrzek.
Imagine binary blobs for the actual bitmaps but all operations on the bitmaps are sequentially translated to code, then simplified on save.
As it is today, there's a half dozen programs that can already read the format.
In any case, that would be good if it could eventually win out, but personally I feel it was started too late, and not had enough buy-in.
I tried to make non-destructive workflows work in other contexts. It is probably not appreciated hard this is. It's easy to get yourself painted into a corner because if a file format says "apply operation x with these parameters", you are now stuck with shipping this operation x with all future versions of the software, even if you come up with a version 2.0 of x that is better, but not quite the same somehow. And if you want that software to keep a sane UI, it must hide that implementation detail of multiple versions of internal stuff somehow, usually with some kind of nasty hack. Especially open source programs are quite notorious for shying back from that because cruft like that is not fun to write or maintain.
Krita, Clip Studio Paint, DxO, aseprite, there are tons of great options if you actually want an application that was written to be "what people who want to do X want in an application", instead of trying to be all things to all users.
If you are looking for „next-level“ check Nuke (The Foundry)- unless you are painting.
I’m doing non destructive editing in Lightroom Classic and moving files over into Photoshop occasionally for finer editing
How do I replace this workflow?
People give it a lot of crap for being a cloud subscription, but I was already paying a bunch of money for cloud photo storage. Now I pay the same fee, except I get there very good desktop and iPad apps to go with it.
To clarify, is Lightroom CC superior?
The same cloud subscription applies
There might still be some small feature gaps but I haven't noticed them. Personally I prefer the new UI (which is almost the same on MacOS, Web, iPad).
Not sure I understand, sorry. What do you mean?
It's great on macOS too, but probably not competitive for pros.
However, the big issue is file format compatibility. Adobe apps are the standard and if you are cooperating with others on some project, you are expected to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible. Thus, you need Adobe apps. And this is not problem just in the graphic design industry, others have it too, like AutoCAD compatibility for CAD or Trados compatibilty for CAT across agencies.
And it's buggy on macOS too. It's the only program on my computer that does some wacky shit with window management, such that sometimes other apps' windows appear on top of it. It very much feels like it tries its best to go against AppKit for no good reason, and then reimplement some of its behavior but shittily. Oh and also, the "new document" dialog takes literally 5 seconds to load.
Edit: I'm using an older version, 2017 I think? Updating it is quite a process as a non-paying user, and none of the new features are worth it for me.
6.0, 7.0, and CS1 were awesome on Mac, but somewhere around CS2 it started falling apart and it's been in a downward spiral ever since.
These days I'm using a mix of Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, and Sketch, but if Adobe dusted off the source on 7.0 or CS1, updated it to work with modern macOS, and offered it as a single time purchase I'd buy it immediately.
They're so old they're PPC-only. And 7.0 even has an OS 9 version. I definitely did use these versions in the mid/late 00s, and they were indeed snappy, but I was on Windows back then. Macs were prohibitively expensive over here.
Just tried on a 2018 Mac mini, and it appeared about 250ms after I hit Command-N.
But to be fair I think the object selection tool is pretty cool and somewhat new & 'innovative.' though still lags behind. AE has had roto for a while and some basic ML you can find online has better feature detection. Still cool to see them heading in this direction having good edges would save a ton of time.
Is there something web-based that's a good equivalent for Photoshop?
I tried https://pixlr.com/ the other day. Is that the best one one in this genre?
For graphics design and artwork i‘d rather go with Affinity Designer.
Affinity Designer (and Sketch) is indeed insanely fast compared to Illustrator, but it's also kind of isolated - the collab story is a lot stronger with Figma.
https://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#when-will-gimp-suppor...
Also, have you tried Pixelmator? It's a native Mac app, it doesn't have any automation features either but it's slick and has great performance.
Also I recommend using the Rete.js library for the underlying nodes editor instead of rolling your own.
Thanks for the Rete.js recommendation, I'll give it a try!
I guess if you're using it as a Windows Paint substitute? Otherwise, here are a few things the version available three decades ago didn't have:
CMYK support, 16-bits-per-channel support, Layers, Adjustments, Actions, Freeform Transform, PNG support, Editable Type, Magnetic Lasso and Pen, Freeform Pen, Multiple Undo, Layer Effects, Save For Web, Vector Shapes, Vector Text, Healing Brush, Spell Check, Camera RAW.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Photoshop#Version_histor... for more highlights.
> Apple is the only reason this piece of junk is still selling.
The macOS/Windows mix was already ~50/50 way back in the 2000s. It's likely that the Creative Cloud audience is far more heavily skewed toward Windows today.
Last year they added the Object Selection Tool which I’ve found incredibly useful and innovative. However this year they are adding a ton of fluff, such as a FaceApp clone that creates (imo horrible) ML edit renders on their servers.
Like Adobe's tools are often improved but, it feels like from a user's perspective, that they're stacking kludge on kludge (similar to Oracle DB or Microsoft's Outlook).
This may be unfair, for all I know Photoshop has a great codebase, but the bugs I've seen and experienced give me a bad impression.
(in effect: should this need [2009] added, given that this is just a repost that looks like it's just cashing in on other folk's content?)
Although I'm somewhat inclined to give the Google juice to b3n.org since they went to the effort to dredge it up, and it appears to be a legitimate weblog.
In the early days of the web this would've been a very normal use of a weblog and no one would have thought twice about it.
I guess I would liken it to re-posting an image, except it's just copy/pasting the text.
There is some degree of media creation in putting a frame around the specific block of text. Like a photograph.
Screenshotting a block of text like this and putting it on Instagram would also be a normal thing to do. Although it would be shittier to disseminate because there could be no backlink.
https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/master/XeePhotoshopLoader.m#...
which has been shared quite a lot in the past
But to play the devil's advocate... Over the past 31 years, PSD has been used by millions of professionals and amateurs alike to power everything from photo touch-up to web design and earning Adobe billions in the process.
I would LOVE to be responsible for a "terrible" piece of technology that has achieved so much.
It may be time to create a portable format that holds the same information than a PSD (but using a saner structure).
I'd argue that's even worse than just using PSD by itself. If you open a PSD-inside-TIFF file in an image editor that doesn't recognize that PSD data or which discards unknown TIFF tags when saving, you'll end up having the PSD data getting stripped simply by saving.
Another problem is there might be a mismatch between the TIFF raster data and the embedded PSD document attached. For example someone could open the file in a PSD-unaware editor, make changes, and save the file only making changes to the TIFF raster data. Then later, when someone opens the file in Photshop, they won't see the changes because Photoshop ignored the newer TIFF raster data and used the older, embedded PSD document within it instead.
Do you have a source for that?
I'm not saying it's not (hence my question), but how would opening Photoshop, drawing a line, then saying this as a PSD count as personal data?
There is a definition from the ICO site:
“‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person”.
So for example if you draw a line in Photoshop and by the way you drawn it someone can tell it was definitely you, then this is personal data.
If you compose music and through its style it can be said that this is definitely something you made, this is also personal data and so on.
That's why when you request data download for example from Facebook you get everything, not just your name, email and list of IP addresses you logged in from.