Photoshop CS6 beta now available to download | Hacker News Reader

Photoshop CS6 beta now available to download

extremetech.com

66 pointsmrsebastian51 comments

The layer stack system is getting really tired. Here's what I'd like to see:

- Node-based layer system, like Quartz Composer and Max/MSP. Right now, any complex nesting of layer styles has to be done via Smart Objects, which is a terrible hack that has you saving, seeing what the effect on the final image is, then going back and making more changes, repeat.

- It's 2012. There should not be destructive filters anymore. All filters should just be another node in this layout. If you'd like to apply them, you should be able to right click a node and merge everything that feeds into it. Brushes should also be usable as layers. Composite everything.

- Where's this layer system going to go? Obviously, it will go on screen, but how about an iPad app that pairs with Photoshop for displaying and altering it? They already have something sort of like this for tools.

- Photoshop badly needs usable variables of some sort. I'm tired of jumping around 5 different places because I decided I want to change a color.

- Going with the last one, documents should be able to contain multiple images, like Illustrator does. This would be a great addition for icon design, since you could (easily, without ugly hacks) have all of your sizes in the same document. Combine that with variables, and...

- Finally, stop the sucky non-native UI already. Stop replacing perfectly good Cocoa widgets with terrible Air ones.

Adding fancy new features is nice and stuff, but the fundamental UI of this application is getting really dated.

I've been waiting for variables for years, so sad it's still not there. Not only for colors, but also for values like shadow width, etc.

Definitely agree with the non-native UI point. I've been using Photoshop for years on my Macbooks, and the interface has always had a clunky, slow, unnatural, and Flash-era feel to it. I wonder what the reasoning behind using this terrible UI vs Cocoa is?

Portability. It would be very inconvenient to maintain two completely separate UI codebases.

Yes, but shouldn't some portability be sacrificed? Google Chrome, for example, has the same interface on OS X and Windows, but is fast and has a native feel on both platforms.

There's a vast, vast gap in the complexity of Chrome's ui and Photoshop's. I maintain an app with a cross-platform ui (Mac/Windows/*nix), and it adds an enormous amount of time re-doing everything on different platforms, particularly Mac.

Cocoa UI isn't that great. The Photoshop UI is much more compact and suitable for the kind of application it is. Turning it into a cocoa app would degrade the experience considerably.

What they are missing in the UI I think is a search function! Just a little bar on top (yes, you could toggle it off for Unity haters) to which you could easily get to with a keyboard shortcut and just type in e.g. "liquify", hit enter and the liquify filter pops up.

I have no idea why that has not been done yet, or am I simply missing something?

Cmd+shift+/ might work for what you want, assuming you're on a mac.

Nice list of new features here: http://bjango.com/articles/photoshopcs6/

Seems they addressed a lot of criticism, and improved the UI for web designers in particular.

I hope they're devoting some resources to Fireworks. For web & mobile app graphics I find it far more effective than Photoshop but there are still a lot of rough edges to smooth out.

I'm downloading the beta now but a question for any Creative Suite users, have you had any luck getting CS apps to work when installed anywhere else but /applications on Mac? I have multiple users on this mac and only want CS to be usable for one user. I've moved the apps into ~/applications but updates break. :/ Also, Is it just me or do any other Mac users get infuriated with their folder/app structure?

> Also, Is it just me or do any other Mac users get infuriated with their folder/app structure?

Adobe's complete disrespect for your file system is legendary.

And to make the experience even worse, if you move the 7 useless folders in say /Applications into something like /Applications/Adobe (that you never use anyway), their software updater breaks all over the place.

It's a hack, but if you have XCode installed, you can outright hide the directories.

    /usr/bin/SetFile -a V /Applications/Adobe\ Foo

Photoshop is a classic example of bloatware taken to the extreme. I'm running CS5 and routinely run out of RAM with just a few modest files open. It's ridiculous. I'm going back to CS3 as soon as I find some time to upgrade

One of the best feature of CS5 is the content aware fill, I very rarely use Photoshop these days, but that feature made it so so so easy to clean up some images that needed some stuff removed from them without having to resort to a very manual and error prone (for me) task. Totally agree of the bloatware, luckily I now have a really beefy machine!

yeah I'm really starting to realise that I'm using the wrong tool for the job. I only use it for web design, so from my pov all the photo features are bloat.

Too right. All those photo features are just bloating up Photoshop! In fact, not just the photo features. I use it exclusively for writing essays, so all those image functions are just useless.

To be fair, though, it does a better job with my novels than Autocad does with my taxes. You can be sure that piece of junk got a 1 star review on the App Store.

Funny. But I don't think you tackle the above poster's point.

Photoshop is the defacto standard tool for all kinds of image processing (not just photo-editing), and many (most?) of its day-to-day users actually don't use a significant portion of its features, which just clog up their systems.

I for one use photoshop every second day in my line of work, and 98% of what I need it for I could have done in photoshop 5, 10 years ago.

From my experience too many people are using Photoshop for areas where they should be using Illustrator. In collateral such as logos or signage, vector-based files are infinitely easier to work with, yet I can't tell you how many times I've been given .psd files by designers tasked with such projects.

I'm probably the same as you. I think Photoshop 6 has enough of the features I require (bar the new content aware stuff).

I would be great to be able to switch off a whole bunch of the features and filters and god-knows-what-else-it-loads-at-startup stuff and only load them if I actually need them, or be able to switch them off completely with some sort of custom profile. If i need some hardcore editing then I'll go into advanced mode or something.

hehe touché

Fireworks is far, far better for UI design, both for native apps and for web apps. I wished I'd discovered it a long time ago. I hardly ever even launch PS anymore but I use Fireworks all the time.

That's funny you should say that, I initially started out using Fireworks when I started as an intern as a web developers. This was back in 2000, and designs were all table based, so Fireworks was great for splicing into the required segments.

I'd have to agree that Fireworks is probably better suited for most web design needs... It used to be real simple to switch between the 2 packages, guessing it is still the same...

I'm one of those casual users who maybe uses an image editing program a few times a year. I also found Fireworks to be a much better tool for these tasks.

Last week was another of those times when I needed to open a graphic and tweak a logo for the web. But I have a new laptop now, and didn't want to pay for Fireworks or go through the install just for something that I use so rarely.

So I decided to try out Inkscape and although it has a klunky X11 interface, I found it does everything that I need. Not bad for free software...

Even Fireworks is overkill if you do these kinds of things that rarely but it's certainly a lot cheaper than Photoshop and it's paid for itself several times over in my work.

Indeed. I do lots of development using Unity and need Photoshop fairly frequently. Unity runs fine, but when I launch Photoshop it's time for a coffee break and to live with my Mac limping along for the forseeable future.

No software is able to cripple my hardware like Photoshop.

Disagree. Photoshop is a professional level tool. When they're building new features, they aren't listening to the common guy who uses 10-20% of the features every once in a while. They're listening to the design professional who has photoshop open 24/7. They guy who lives in photoshop is their customer. That's the person who's willing to drop $1k on a piece of software - the other common guy is just going to download the trial and block activate.adobe.com. If you think photoshop is bloatware, it's because you aren't using all of its features. Photoshop is vast in its depth. Keeping a thousand states of a high res picture in ram takes a lot of memory. Keeping hundreds of composited layers and transforms in ram is equally hungry.

You can curtail your ram usage if you want it to use less - the default is set to be fairly greedy. For myself though, I have photoshop set to use up to 20GB of RAM (and I routinely hit that mark) with a dedicated SSD for caching, but that's because I use 80-90% of the features in photoshop. If you're only using 10% of the program, consider switching programs.

Yeah that's a fair enough comment. The truth is that I'm probably using more like 2% of the program. I think for someone like me the perfect balance of features/performance was at about cs2/cs3 maybe even cs1, I cant remember. So I most likely will be downgrading.

Check out Pixelmator or Acorn?

Not related to CS6... but has anyone been successful using Photoshop with Linux? I've tried getting it to run through wine before, but never with any luck.

I never had any luck getting it to work on Linux :( Honestly, If They mac CS for Linux I'd consider leaving the Mac "ecosystem".

It's hard to imagine it being worth the cost proposition for them to support several flavors of Lunux plus all of the hardware driver support issues that would crop up. It would cost them a tremendous amount in development, upkeep, and support. I'm sure there's a market for it... just not big enough to be worth it.

Here's an answer to that from a couple hours ago.

https://twitter.com/#!/dhowe/status/182691163936006146

David Howe - ‏ @dhowe - Director of Photoshop Engineering

@ColinHarrington We have looked at Wine on & off, the last time a few years ago. Not usually a high-enough priority given other demands.

12:52 AM - 22 Mar 12

I've found CS2 to work with Wine. Wasn't there a story of Google contributing code to Wine to make Photoshop work? CS5 is listed as Gold on http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application...

I use The Gimp anyway (I know, I know).

Actually, browsing that entry paints a bleaker picture. Of the five most recent testing reports, two are gold, one silver, one bronze, one garbage.

According to the bronze report:

The text tool causes the entire application to freeze (even with atmlib installed). The paintbrush works only very intermittently. Moving and docking panels was buggy, and the bluish docking indicators instead rendered as black rectangles making it impossible to see.

and:

What was not tested: Vector manipulations, filters, adjustment layers.

It's fine for playing with Photoshop on Linux a bit, but not something you'd want to rely on for your business. I guess a virtual machine with Windows is still the most viable solution.

I tried Gimp. I really tried because I really wanted that to work... but just couldn't get out of Photoshop "mode" even after a couple months of using it. More power to you for succeeding!

I've gotten things to work, but even versions that are listed as "platinum" still have things that break here and there. I've found it's better to not try. Linux runs great in a vm. I've taken to using windows or OSX as my host system for my photoshop needs, then just doing everything linuxy over ssh to a vm. Not everyone is comfortable with that workflow, but I've found it's better than trying to run photoshop in wine.

That is exactly what I'm doing as well. :) The other day though I used another laptop running Ubuntu and I realized how much I missed booting into Linux and realized the only reason I'm using Windows is for Photoshop. I might try flipping it at some point and run Windows in the VM, but last time I tried my machine just wasn't enough to do that.

I think this is going to be the Photoshop where people seriously start considering a web-based alternative. Not because CS6 will be poor software, but because I think the division among users who use Photoshop for photo editing/professional photography/restoration/stationary/brochure design and those who use it for designing web sites and applications is getting greater. The latter needing less of the options available in Photoshop today, let alone CS6. I say this with over 10 years of experience as a designer/developer – Photoshop needs a Basecamp simplicity-inspired derivative. I think as we move to more institutional, common & predictable UI (if we do), we'll find that we're doing very simple tasks and that those tasks can be taken from Photoshop and automated for the purpose of web/app design and execution. I know there are a few alternatives to Photoshop already, but of all the ones I've seen (yes, even Pixelmator) none of them really go for just the web industry. I think the market for such a tool (hopefully web-based) would be pretty great at this point – and given the audience – using state-of-the-art browser API wouldn't be much of an issue.

Long ago, Adobe had this product called "Photoshop Server" or something similar. I believe it was based off of Macromedia's Generator (which generated server-side Flash content). The concept was neat - place variables within a PSD, upload it and allow the server to render out based on what you wanted to show. The problem with this, of course, was that it was proprietary, heavy, expensive and overall pretty crappy. It would be really interesting to see someone create a web-based web design/development application that interacted with some OSS library that most hosting companies would allow (like gd, ning, etc), read .json and interpret data within the image.

Probably a bad idea, but how big would a .json-based image be compared to the average jpg? Pretty big, I'll bet. But I wonder with gzip compression how manageable could it be? Would be really cool to define information (text inside of the image, accessibility, SEO capabilities) within a .json-based image. No license required and it would be readable by any human or software.

  {
    "dimensions": { "width": 3, "height": 3 },
    "data": [
         ["rgba(255,255,255,1)","rgba(255,255,255,1)","rgba(255,255,255,1)"],
         ["rgba(255,255,255,1)","rgba(255,255,255,1)","rgba(255,255,255,1)"],
         ["rgba(255,255,255,1)","rgba(255,255,255,1)","rgba(255,255,255,1)"]
     ]
  }

Yep. That would be huge. I suppose that is a massive digression of the topic but this would be my ideal image format, outside of svg/canvas of course.

I think this is going to be the Photoshop where people seriously start considering a web-based alternative. Not because CS6 will be poor software, but because I think the division among users who use Photoshop for photo editing/professional photography/restoration/stationary/brochure design and those who use it for designing web sites and applications is getting greater. The latter needing less of the options available in Photoshop today, let alone CS6.

Photoshop is used by creative professionals first and foremost. It's a $600+ software package.

(The people using Photoshop that don't need much of it's power are mostly those that use a pirated copy for some basic home use).

That said, there is Photoshop Elements already, a cut down version.

And there is a web version made by Adobe too.

That said, web editors: sucked, and still suck. For some very basic stuff ok. But try even uploading your last 100 12mo pictures you took with your compact camera. Even uploading and editing one by one, it will take ages, usually taking down the browser at some point.

_(The people using Photoshop that don't need much of it's power are mostly those that use a pirated copy for some basic home use)._

I disagree.

I did pirate a copy for home use - I was a youngling, the version was v5.0 (not CS5), and that early curiosity turned into a career full of purchased Adobe products.

Along the way I've learned a lot of new tricks, but my core practices are largely similar to what they've always been. I struggle to think of any other tool or skill that's changed less over that length of time - for me, the new useful bits are largely codifying and refining old manual processes.

It's precisely because the core has remained so untouched by age that the simplified version can be translated to iPads and web apps - Photoshop is a classic case of 20% of the features are used by everyone, and the rest is deemed absolutely essential by specific groups. This happens to most successful programs over time.

Building Photoshop again for other mediums can't help but discard a lot of cruft while discovering a bunch of significantly new things to do - it's actually a pretty exciting time for image editors as they rediscover purpose and set new charters.

Well, the "codifying and refining old manual processes" is what software like Photoshop is all about. Where do you draw the line?

A lot of stuff introduced AFTER version 5 is used everyday by almost anyone. In fact, Layer Styles (version 6) is the number one requested feature for Pixelmator.

Other stuff:

fully vector text, camera RAW (7),

Shadow/Highlight, Match Color, Lens Blur, Hierarchical layer groups, 16 bit per channel, support for files over 2 Gigabytes, type on a path (8),

Smart Objects, Smart Sharpen (9),

Smart (non-destructive) Filters (10)

And other stuff, maybe not visible, but that we couldn't live without AT ALL, like Intel Mac support, and 64-bit support, plus the "how did we work before" GPU support, all introduced in later versions than 10.

Good points! I actually don't have much of an argument to make, just the evolution of old+successful software is an interesting topic. It is definitely a fuzzy line between "new thing" and "old but better", and your list has a bunch of must-have-every-single-day features that haven't always existed. I admit I'm glossing over the "invisible" work like Intel Mac support. I'm mostly interested in the interaction.

But - that list is fairly short, and things like nondestructive filters, hierarchical layer groups, type on a path, etc are exactly the codifying of manual processes I was talking about. They've certainly replaced duplicating layers and using complicated naming conventions to manage all the bloat.

So they're technically "new features", but they're not reinventing what folks can accomplish, or even altering the fundamentals of how one thinks about a task. That's a big accomplishment for software that has to please so many existing+trained users, and I'm looking forward to CS6 precisely because it seems focused on improvements to what people already do every day, rather than cool but rarely appropriate features like magic background fills and bending spoons.

We've been given a huge toolbelt to work with - the move from desktop software to web and tablets is going to be pretty awesome as we look at the whole belt through a new lens, and (potentially) significantly improve on everything from palette-oriented UI to how we manage discreet and grouped elements in a complex composition. Even more opportunity as Photoshop begins to acknowledge its expansion of purpose from photos and graphics to quickly comping high-fidelity interactive UIs.

Relative to all that's coming, Photoshop hasn't changed much. Exciting times ahead.

Great overview of what's new from Marc Edwards http://bjango.com/articles/photoshopcs6/

Still can't install on a case-sensitive file system. Seriously Adobe, how hard is it to fix your Makefiles?

I'm going to try Pixelmator again. There's absolutely no reason why this app should need an installer.

The built in GPU acceleration depends on quite a few libraries. Not only that, but the interface is entirely custom (based on air). Photoshop isn't some little stand alone app. It's a 2GB behemoth. Why wouldn't it have an installer?

My point was more big-picture. The app shouldn't have an entirely custom Air-based UI when there are great Cocoa libraries available. Hell, even a hybrid with some Cocoa would be better (ala Aperture). It _should_ be a stand alone app at this point.

The argument about "people wouldn't want to transfer to the new UI" is conjecture. Film pros have been switching to new versions of Final Cut Pro without complaint.

Download for free or the usual first-born list price?

I get an Access Denied when trying to download the beta..

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