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Comment by HellDunkel | Hacker News Reader

Its not just the file format, Photoshop is an abysmal product altogether. Features are basically the same as three decades ago. Linear 32bit workflow is broken to the point of unfixable. API basically not there. Automation laughable. GPU support not even worth mentioning. Referencing will freeze your computer for 1h a day when used in bigger projects. Apple is the only reason this piece of junk is still selling.

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> Features are basically the same as three decades ago.

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.

You are right, i should have written 2 decades instead of 3. Sorry for getting carried away.

What features are you looking for? If anything, I feel like they’re bloating Photoshop with features.

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.

I would much rather want a serious refactoring rather than a single feature. Python integration is nice in any image processing application but would make little sense with the current state of PS. Proper HDR workflow is needed but to be honest i stopped caring. The only reason i still spend time with PS is clients providing psds.

Content aware fill is very recent and really cool.

> Apple is the only reason this piece of junk is still selling.

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.

As someone who used to spend countless hours in Photoshop it was hard to watch PS becoming worse on macOS with each major revision.

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.

I switched to Affinity when I got a new mac and could not port my old copy of CS6 over. I'm having a hard time getting used to it, to be honest. How did you get past the learning curve?

Just kept adobe stuff completely uninstalled so I had no other option, really. Still don't have affinity mastered as well though, it's a work in progress. Sketch came along pretty easy, it's much more natural for UI work than Illustrator.

Dreamweaver is very stuck in the past also. Adobe put some Brackets code into it, to try improve it (Adobe version of VS Code), and somehow managed to make it worse. You would think they would have brought in the good part (its ecosystem of plugins) but no, they pulled in a bit of code rendering and nothing much else. It cant even do basic linting of JavaScript!, does really annoying focus stealing on the OS (click maximize on other application stays hidden), and crashes and rendering goes fuzzy all the time.

Dreamweaver? That's the name I haven't heard in a long time. I remember being taught how to use it as a static website generator. Is someone still using this thing?

> 6.0, 7.0, and CS1 were awesome on Mac

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.

> Oh and also, the "new document" dialog takes literally 5 seconds to load.

Just tried on a 2018 Mac mini, and it appeared about 250ms after I hit Command-N.

The recent update seems to have fixed my biggest bug - like bare minimum broken app... It wouldn't 'paint' when you switch windows and back; it was just a grey block of nothing, would have to zoom in and out to see the graphics. Doesn't happen anymore, also make sure 'use graphics processor' is on.

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.

> Apple is the only reason this piece of junk is still selling.

Not sure I understand, sorry. What do you mean?

Photoshop and Apple are just very much connected in peoples minds and there is little competition for PS on iOS.

On iOS, I think Pixelmator is a strong competitor.

It's great on macOS too, but probably not competitive for pros.

Affinity Photo seems to be more capable than Pixelmator (Pro). Pixelmator is nice, but it is still on the simpler side. Still amazing and great value for money (though Serif has a sale during the pandemic, so you can get Affinity apps for less than Pixelmator right now).

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.

Figma (which is web-based) is a great alternative to Adobe Illustrator (at least for UI design).

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?

https://www.photopea.com/ is similar to pixlr. I prefer it.

At first sight: It borrows a lot more from PS (including the complexity) compared to Pixlr, which seems like it wants to be a mix of Photoshop and Illustrator, but simplified like Figma. Thanks!

Maybe for minimalistic UI design. But even there i would rather not want to work with a web tool (graphics is compute hungry).

For graphics design and artwork i‘d rather go with Affinity Designer.

My impression is that many/most UI graphics designers migrated to the web based Figma because it's a lot faster than the native Illustrator. A bunch of them went there via the mac-only Sketch. Shame on Adobe.

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.

As someone who uses Photoshop since version 6, I use both Gimp and Krita at work (because I use Linux there). Both are really quite usable and worth a look.

yesterday i ran into the fact that gimp has zero support for non-destructive editing (e.g. adjustment layers) AFAIK, which makes it a non-starter for many many cases.

https://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#when-will-gimp-suppor...

Not a professional myself, but lack of non-destructive editing is the reason I don't mention GIMP when talking to professionals. NDE can't come soon enough.

I've been working on an app I describe as "Visual programming meets Photoshop" (https://pixel.gl, just a prototype though). Any chance I could contact you for some advice/feedback? Or could you elaborate on what kind of missing API and automation features Photoshop should have?

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.

How do you deal with features that cannot be modeled as pure functions or are too computationally heavy to rerender on change? For example, user selections, copy and paste, ray tracing.

Also I recommend using the Rete.js library for the underlying nodes editor instead of rolling your own.

I was hoping to use computer vision for things that a user might do by hand, e.g. removing the background/foreground. I'm focusing on 2D image processing so most functions are pretty performant if you use WebGL, even for large images.

Thanks for the Rete.js recommendation, I'll give it a try!

What would you say is the superior alternative?

Depends on what you actually want to do, because Photoshop is an all-trick-three-legged-pony, whereas the alternatives are all "we need to do X, and we need to do it well, let's actually make that application instead of something as insane as Photoshop".

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.

Affinity Photo is probably the best option right now.

Yes- Affinity Designer is also really nice for vector graphics. But they are just clones.

If you are looking for „next-level“ check Nuke (The Foundry)- unless you are painting.

Nuke seems to be a 2D-3D/video compositing application. That’s bringing in a huge amount of complexity if you’re trying to deal with 2D still images. It’s an Adobe After Effects competitor, surely?

Yes it is a postproduction tool and built for compositing but even for still images it is light years ahead of photoshop. It is also rock solid and extremly fast. Simple stuff such as writing a png is 100 times faster.

Isn’t that for video compositing and costs thousands of dollars?

The Affinity suite is quite decent, among them Affinity Photo would be the Photoshop replacement. It‘s fast, easy to understand, a pleasant UI and has all the features you need.

Affinity’s iPad UI is quite nice and relatively full-featured as well.

Better alternative pipeline?

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?

Lightroom CC is unmatched in terms of non-destructive editing and library management. Support for RAW files in numerous formats, easy cloud syncing, smart previews that take up significantly less size on your mobile devices, and serve as a proxy for small tweaks, easy sharing, etc.

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.

I’m using Lightroom Classic CC

To clarify, is Lightroom CC superior?

The same cloud subscription applies

You can sync a set of collections in a library with CC to get the best of both worlds. I still prefer Classic.

I had used what is now "Classic" for years before CC was launched and it always had horrible performance issues.

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).

I used it recently for the first time in 5 years and it has new/improved features - but the rest of your points still stand

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